Baby Trouble: The Spy′s Secret Family
Baby Trouble: The Spy's Secret Family
Cindy Dees
Carla Cassidy
Beth Cornelison
The Spy’s Secret FamilyWhen tycoon Nick Cass wakes up in a hospital room, he has no memory of the beautiful woman at his side. Yet when Laura Delaney tells him their son has been kidnapped, Nick has no choice but trust her – and rescue their chance at a future.Operation Baby Rescue Elise was devastated when the doctors told her that her newborn daughter had died shortly after birth. Finding comfort in a support group, she meets widower Jared… and their unanswered questions about their losses might just lead them to a new family…Cowboy’s Triplet TroubleAfter a reckless one-night stand Grace tracks down the father of her new triplets – and discovers that he has no intention of being a dad. But, when his brother, gorgeous rancher Jake Johnson, comes to her rescue, it seems Grace might have found her hero after all…
Baby Trouble
The Spy’s
Secret Family
Cindy Dees
Operation Baby
Rescue
Beth Cornelison
Cowboy’s
Triplet Trouble
Carla Cassidy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Cover (#uc715e101-6c95-5678-8bfa-0b589181a385)
Title Page (#u6d08bdcc-d115-561c-a84d-eb64ce1ea16c)
The Spy’s Secret Family (#ub48e6136-6cb1-5254-b947-aa976ee7652c)
About the Author (#u6056a668-67fe-5963-86c1-c72e885f4fb4)
Dedication (#u02546991-4c7d-5d9c-b7b1-b1a6e660f3a0)
Chapter 1 (#u38d12cd7-b42d-55a1-ab9d-5423d14e81e8)
Chapter 2 (#u50cb5203-b894-5dab-996c-40dcd0073ddb)
Chapter 3 (#u1df14617-556b-50f5-b0ca-5602337cd202)
Chapter 4 (#u940c86cf-a39a-5606-834e-62ae7613470f)
Chapter 5 (#u105e4845-d4dd-5f1c-a2ac-fb711c5034e1)
Chapter 6 (#udf8b14d5-4e48-5615-b19c-b5579d1ce71f)
Chapter 7 (#ufa1ebac1-c608-571e-8998-08488803c7cf)
Chapter 8 (#ub3def8fd-7953-5782-90a0-ada7095c1880)
Chapter 9 (#u0b7f30cb-7078-5052-93a7-51bf9043a46b)
Chapter 10 (#u05debb2f-8c86-52bd-bd3c-0fd964900107)
Chapter 11 (#ube7eacef-d914-5fea-8844-82d0d5508703)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Operation Baby Rescue (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Cowboy’s Triplet Trouble (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
The Spy’s Secret Family (#ulink_322cf232-8608-577c-a80a-7914b0adf536)
Cindy Dees
CINDY DEES started flying airplanes while sitting in her dad’s lap at the age of three and got a pilot’s license before she got a driver’s license. At age fifteen, she dropped out of high school and left the horse farm in Michigan where she grew up to attend the University of Michigan. After earning a degree in Russian and East European Studies, she joined the US Air Force and became the youngest female pilot in its history. She flew supersonic jets, VIP airlift and the C-5 Galaxy, the world’s largest airplane. During her military career, she traveled to forty countries on five continents, was detained by the KGB and East German secret police, got shot at, flew in the first Gulf War and amassed a lifetime’s worth of war stories. Her hobbies include medieval re-enacting, professional Middle Eastern dancing and Japanese gardening.
This RITA
Award-winning author’s first book was published in 2002 and since then she has published more than twenty-five bestselling and award-winning novels. She loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at www.cindydees.com (http://www.cindydees.com).
This book is for Shana Smith because it absolutely, positively couldn’t have happened without her. Truly.
You’re the best!
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b51ffa32-0d96-5230-90bb-ac1f3ad68a4c)
Why wasn’t he dead?
Nick stared up at the featureless white ceiling of his hospital room as the beeping of a heart monitor punctuated the panic flowing through his veins. Why hadn’t they killed him? Why five years of captivity instead—in a shipping container, on a cargo ship, floating around in international waters?
And why couldn’t he remember what came just before his kidnapping? The doctors told him he’d sustained a serious head injury at some point during his incarceration. Whether a captor had hit him during an interrogation or he’d fallen during one of the massive open-sea storms that had tossed him like a cork inside his steel prison, he had no recollection.
He coughed thickly. Supposedly, his pneumonia was mostly under control now. It had been touch and go there for a while. But the worry lurking in his nurses’ eyes had eased in the past day or so. He gathered he was out of the woods, which was good news.
They were still working on clearing his body of various other infections and trying to restore normal function to his digestive tract. The only way he was putting on weight was via the massive calorie infusions running through his IV.
They’d cut his dark hair and shaved off his matted beard, revealing the unnatural paleness of his usually olive complexion. The psychiatrists said he might never remember the lost time, a memory gap spanning approximately two years prior to his capture and the first three years or so of his imprisonment. Funny how the shrinks were trying so hard to retrieve those memories and he was trying equally hard not to retrieve them. Absolute certainty vibrated ominously in his gut, warning him that whatever lurked in that black hole of lost time was best left there.
Was whatever he’d forgotten the reason he was still alive? Had his captors been waiting for him to remember something? Or was there some other, more sinister reason that someone had been hell-bent on imprisoning him?
Maybe he was just being paranoid. Although it wasn’t paranoia if someone was really after him. Even now, he expected his keepers to burst into his hospital room and haul him back to his box. The idea actually made a certain sick sense. If his captors had orders to keep him alive and he’d gotten too sick to treat on the ship, they could’ve cooked up this whole rescue ruse to fatten him up and get him healthy enough to toss back in Hell.
Laura Delaney—the woman who’d rescued him from his metal prison and one of the only faces he remembered from the lost years—claimed the two of them had been lovers before he’d disappeared. She’d introduced him to a little boy who looked so much like him it was hard to discount her story that he was the child’s father. He desperately hoped it was true.
She was an extremely attractive woman. It wasn’t difficult to imagine dating someone like her. But was she for real? Or was she part of his captors’ evil head games? Was she here to trick him into revealing whatever secrets his subconscious was guarding so fiercely?
If only there was someone he could trust, really trust, to tell him what was real and what was not.
And then there was the troubling fact that he knew for certain his name wasn’t Nick Cass. Nor had he grown up entirely in Rhode Island. But Laura apparently believed both to be true. He must’ve told the lies himself. But why? If he and Laura were lovers like she claimed, why hadn’t he told her his real name or the most basic facts about his past? Why the deception?
Everywhere he turned, there were only questions and more questions. Frustration sang through his blood as sharply as his secret hope that his freedom, at least, was real. But he dared not share that hope with anyone. Not until he knew if anyone at all was telling him the truth.
Laura paused outside the hospital room, steeling herself not to react to Nick’s emaciated state. It wasn’t his fault he looked fresh out of a Nazi concentration camp, and he didn’t deserve to see her cringe at the sight of his skeletal frame, hollow face or his shadowed blue eyes. God, his eyes. The haunted look in them was terrifying. Would he carry it with him forever?
The shrinks doubted he would recover the years stripped from his memory. But they felt he should recover enough to be a functional member of society once more with time and counseling. He should recover. Not he would.
At this point, she didn’t care if his memory ever came back. She just wanted him back. The man who’d swept her off her feet in a whirlwind romance in Paris. The man who’d captured her heart and taught her what true love could be. If even part of that amazing man came back to her, it would be better than the hollow shell of a man on the other side of the door. She vowed to be grateful for whatever piece of him survived his ordeal. It was surely better than having no part of him at all. The past five years of waiting and wondering had been pure hell.
She knew he wasn’t convinced yet that his rescue was real in spite of that first night of freedom they’d shared. They’d gone to her estate, where he’d bathed and eaten. Then she’d made love to him with all the pent-up passion and relief in her soul.
They’d both cried that night. She’d interpreted his tears as a cathartic release, but she’d been wrong. The shrinks told her he believed that night to have been some sort of elaborate torture by his captors to taunt him with what freedom would be like. Apparently, he’d been crying because the idea of going back into his box after what the two of them had shared had finally broken him. She’d broken him.
The man hadn’t even known who she was, and she’d been so caught up in her euphoria at finding him that she’d never slowed down enough to realize how lost he’d been. Guilt at her thoughtlessness rolled through her. She’d always been a take-charge, full-speed-ahead kind of person. But that tendency had hurt the man she loved. Part of his paranoid state now was her fault. When would she learn to rein herself in? Had her impulsiveness cost her his trust forever?
She took a deep breath and pushed open the door. “Hey, handsome. How are you feeling today?”
“You’re back.” The abject relief in his voice broke her heart a little. What he clearly meant was, “So I get to live another day in this beautiful illusion? Thank God.”
“The doctors say you can go home soon. You’ll still need around-the-clock medical care, but I can hire nurses to look after you.”
Terror flashed in his eyes at the mention of leaving the hospital.
She pretended not to see it and asked lightly, “Do you think when you actually come home to live with me and Adam you’ll believe all of this is real? That you’re free and you have a family?”
He answered slowly, “I don’t know. I hope so.”
Hey, progress! He’d spoken of his feelings. Maybe he’d finally accepted that he was not living in a dream or a terrible trick. She picked up his bony hand and cradled it in hers. It had been so strong once, so capable of giving her pleasure, so confident in its gestures. She murmured, “I love you, Nick. If you believe nothing else, please believe that.”
“Even if you’re lying, the notion makes me happy.”
She smiled down at him. “Give it some time. Give me some time to prove this is real.”
He shrugged. “It isn’t like I have any choice. I’m along for the ride, here. So far, it’s a great dream.”
She smiled bravely while the knife twisted in her gut. “You’ll be on your feet and kicking up your heels in no time. You’ll be able to do whatever you want.”
And please God, let that include staying with her and Adam. Their son desperately needed a father, and she desperately needed the man she loved. Yes, she hadn’t seen him in five years. And yes, he might be an entirely different person than the one she fell in love with way back then. But surely, at least part of the intelligent, passionate, confident man who’d swept her off her feet was still in there, somewhere.
“How can you possibly be real?” he asked reflectively. “You’re too perfect.”
She laughed lightly, praying her panic at his declaration wasn’t audible. “I’m far from perfect. Trust me.”
“Trust. That is the thing, isn’t it? Who will trust whom first in this little chess game?”
“This isn’t a game, Nick. You’re free, you’re going home soon and I love you. That’s the God’s honest truth.”
He made a noncommittal sound, and his cobalt gaze slid away from hers.
He really did have to give his captors credit for playing out this farce to the hilt. Six weeks since his “rescue” and still no hint of tossing him back in his box. He gazed around the plush bedroom suite, decorated in dark woods and deep, comforting colors. It was a far cry from his former prison. Hard to believe he actually caught himself missing the container’s bare metal walls now and then. After a while, its confines had felt safe. Comforting. A steel embrace that kept out worse horrors.
He supposed if he had to trade one cage for another, this one wasn’t bad. It was warmer and softer, and definitely had better food. The hallway door opened and Laura slipped into the room, wearing a slim wool skirt and a silk blouse that clung to her elegant curves in all the right places. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes bright. He added better-looking captors to his list.
In all fairness to her, she’d been nothing but kind and loving to him since she’d opened his box and let him out. She really was a delightful woman, witty and warm, with a quick smile that made her impossible to resist. And she was a devoted mother.
She moved to his side, and he closed his laptop. Yet again, his unreasoning fear at what lurked in his past had prevented him from typing in his real name to an internet search engine. Just a few simple keystrokes, and he’d finally know what monsters lurked in the recesses of his mind. But his terror was just too great. He’d sat there for an hour with the damned computer in his lap and never managed to type a single letter.
Leaning over the chair, Laura kissed him warmly. He didn’t find it hard to believe that he’d loved her once. The only thing keeping him from giving in to serious attraction to the woman was the prospect of losing her. He figured as soon as he fell for her, that would be when the rug got yanked out from under him.
“How’re you feeling today?” she asked eagerly, almost impatiently.
“Fine. You look about ready to burst. Do you have a surprise for me?” His gut clenched. He hated surprises. He was still waiting for the big, nasty one where his captors swept him out of this paradise and whisked him back to Hell Central.
“I do have a surprise for you, Nick. A good one, I hope. Are you strong enough for a bit of a shock?”
Every cell in his being froze. This was it. Sick heat and then icy cold washed through him, leaving him so nauseous he could hardly breathe. His heart pounded and his breathing accelerated so hard that, in seconds, he was light-headed.
His gaze darted about, seeking escape. Seeking a weapon. Anything to defend himself from the attack to come. His gaze lighted on the window. He could make a dash for it. Fling himself through the glass. It was three stories to the ground. If he went head first, the fall ought to kill him. If nothing else, maybe he’d be hurt so bad they couldn’t throw him back in his box. Maybe they’d have to hospitalize him for a few more months.
“I’m pregnant, Nick. We’re going to have a baby.”
His mind went blank. Ever so slowly, his brain managed to form a thought. Not a particularly coherent one, but a thought. What new game was this?
“Did you hear me?” Laura asked excitedly. “You’re going to be a father again.”
His brain simply refused to absorb the information. He couldn’t find a context to put the words in. Couldn’t comprehend the purpose of this new torture.
Laura was laughing. “… too fertile for our own good … first time we made love we got Adam, and now, after that first night you were free, we’re going to have another baby … should really be more careful about birth control in the future …”
She was making words and sentences and probably was even stringing them together in some sort of logical order. But he didn’t understand a thing she was saying.
He did understand, though, that the hallway door was not bursting open. No thugs had come for him yet. The next few minutes passed with him murmuring inane nothings at proper intervals in response to Laura’s babbling joy. And still no one had come.
Could it be? Was this real? Was Laura really pregnant and expecting his child?
Something cracked in his chest. It hurt, but it was a good kind of pain. Was he truly free? Was a life, a future with Laura and his children a possibility? Did he dare hope?
Hope. Now there was a concept.
A baby, huh? His and Laura’s. A little brother or sister for Adam. How he’d love to experience all of it—the morning sickness and messy delivery and midnight feedings. Another child to crawl inside his heart and hold it in his or her tiny, precious hands. Lord knew, Adam had already completely wrapped him around his little finger in the short time he’d spent with the boy. Nick said a fervent prayer every night that, even if all the rest of this was a horrible, cruel lie, God would please let Adam be real. He loved the little boy with all his heart.
And now there might be another child for him to love?
Something exploded in his gut with all the bright fury of a fireworks display, burning away everything that had gone before, cauterizing old wounds, and leaving him empty. New. Reborn.
And then he gave that something a name. Joy.
He was free. Really, truly free. The nightmare was over. He surged up out of the chair and wrapped Laura in a crushing embrace. And then, for the first time, he cried for the right reasons.
Laura didn’t know what clicked for Nick, but after she told him she was pregnant, he changed. He took new interest in food and exercise and spending time with Adam and generally engaged in life more. He got stronger, and gradually, as her belly grew, the haunted look faded from his eyes. He quit eyeing closed doors suspiciously, and the nightmares seemed to fade.
For a while there, she’d wondered if he was too far gone, if she’d be able to pull him out of the emotional abyss into which he’d fallen. But this baby seemed to have done the trick. She rubbed her rounded tummy affectionately. Things were working out better than she could ever have dreamed. Life was darned near perfect.
Nick stared at the laptop on his desk for the hundredth time. He’d been avoiding the thing for months, ever since Laura had told him she was pregnant, afraid to rock the boat of this new life. Everything was so good for him—for all of them—that he had no desire to do anything to threaten the perfection of it all.
But his curiosity had been building. Maybe it was a sign of his recovery that he was starting to feel the tug of waiting answers. What had happened during those lost years? Why the lies about his identity? Who’d had him kidnapped and thrown into a box? And why hadn’t that person or persons just killed him outright?
Certainty that he did not want to know the answers, no matter how tantalizing they might be, still raged in his gut. Whatever his former life had been, he had no pressing need to resume it. Laura was wealthy enough for them and their children to live in the lap of luxury for several lifetimes. Whoever else he’d left behind in his old life had no doubt made peace long ago with his disappearance and gotten on with their own lives. His return now could only cause disruption and chaos.
But what if his old life, his old identity, came looking for him?
Nah. Surely that had been the whole point of his kidnapping. To turn him into a ghost. Make him disappear for good. As long as he stayed a ghost, made no effort to resume his former life, there was no reason for his past to come looking for him. Right?
The key was to keep a low profile. He closed the laptop with a solid thunk. Nope. Curiosity or no curiosity, he was not going anywhere near his old life.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_761ee30d-8a76-59fd-9afe-7895db4d14c1)
Laura sighed. Her perfectly orchestrated schedule for the day had been blown to heck by her obstetrician running nearly two hours late. Not that she begrudged some other patient an emergency C-section. But today, of all days, she’d really needed her doctor to be on time. Because of the delay, she hadn’t had time to swing by home and drop off the baby with the nanny before this important meeting with Nick’s lawyers.
She winced at the sliding noise of her minivan’s side door. Baby Ellie, six weeks old today, was asleep inside, and Laura desperately needed her to stay that way for the next hour. She detached the baby carrier from the car seat base, threw the baby bag over her shoulder and hurried across the parking lot toward the glass and chrome high-rise housing Tatum and Associates, the law firm that would be representing Nick in the upcoming AbaCo trial.
Nick was the star witness for the prosecution. As such, Carter Tatum expected him to come under withering cross-examination by the defense lawyers representing the company’s chief of security, Hans Kurtis Schroder. He’d been accused of masterminding a kidnapping and human-trafficking ring using AbaCo ships without the company’s knowledge. Personally, Laura doubted Schroder was the top dog in the scheme. He was the sacrificial lamb to protect his bosses.
Today was a coaching session for Nick in how to act on the witness stand. It was guaranteed to be stressful. A part of her that she was trying darned hard to ignore worried that Nick wouldn’t be able to handle it. But he’d endured worse. He’d be fine, right?
She stepped out of the elevator and a receptionist ushered her to a plush conference room. Nick smiled and came over to relieve her of baby and bag. Her heart still swelled when he looked at her like that, so tall and dark and handsome. He’d filled out in the past year, lost the gaunt pallor, rebuilt the athletic physique that had first caught her attention in Paris. A shorter haircut than he’d worn then gave him a polished air that felt more Wall Street than European Bohemian. He cut a smashingly gorgeous figure. Her hands itched to get inside his shirt.
As observant as ever, his gaze went dark and smoky. “You are quite a temptation, yourself,” he murmured. “Shall we cancel this meeting and go somewhere private?”
She smiled regretfully even as she leaned toward him, pulled in by his magnetic appeal and completely uninterested in resisting it. He stepped forward and his head lowered toward hers. Her breath hitched and she was abruptly hot from head to toe.
A door burst open behind her and several people walked into the room. Nick’s gaze shifted briefly to the intruders and then, ignoring them, he completed the kiss. It was a relatively chaste thing, but her toes still curled into tight little knots of pleasure in her Jimmy Choos heels.
“Ahh. You’re here, Ms. Delaney. Good. We can get started.”
“Sorry I’m late,” she murmured. “The doctor was backed up, and I had no time to get home and back here.”
Nick cupped her elbow, escorting her to the table and holding her chair for her. “And how’s our little angel?” he asked, gazing down at his daughter fondly.
Laura’s heart swelled at the adoration in his voice. “Mother and daughter both received clean bills of health.” More precisely, daughter was over her mild jaundice, and mother was finally cleared to have sex again. The past six weeks of abstinence had been murder on her. Nick had just laughed, saying that five years locked up had taught him a great deal of patience.
“Can I get you something to drink, darling?” Nick asked. She shook her head, and his fingers brushed lightly across the back of her neck as he made his way to his own seat. She shivered from head to toe in anticipation of tonight.
Carter Tatum spoke from the end of the table. “This afternoon we’re going to try to approximate how AbaCo’s lawyers will question Nick. As unpleasant as it may be, I would remind you we’re on your side.”
Laura, a former CIA operative, had been through training at their infamous Farm, and she highly doubted a bunch of lawyers could throw anything at Nick that she hadn’t seen before.
Carter gestured and in short order a trio of lawyers was taking turns rapid-firing questions at Nick. They started with his kidnapping. The Paris police believed he’d been drugged at the Paris Opera and taken to the shipping container in which he spent the next five years. Nick denied remembering any of it. If only she’d gone to the opera with Nick that night, but her CIA partner—and ex-lover, truth be told—had been missing, and she’d been following up a lead.
The lawyers pressed Nick about any enemies who might have paid people to ghost him, and she listened with interest. This was a subject he’d flatly refused to discuss with her. It worried her mightily that whoever’d had him kidnapped was waiting to pounce again. Again, he denied knowing anything.
The next lawyer pushed harder and Nick’s shoulders climbed defensively. When the third lawyer pressed even more aggressively for information about Nick’s past, he crossed his arms stubbornly and quit speaking altogether. Darn it. That was the same thing he did to her whenever she brought up the subject.
“Water break,” Carter announced abruptly.
Laura released the breath she’d been holding. Nick slumped in his chair, his head down. She put a supportive hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he answered roughly. But his arm trembled beneath her palm, and his jaw clenched so hard he looked about ready to crack a molar.
She suggested gently, “Let’s call this for today. We’ll come back another time when you’re feeling better—”
“We finish it now,” he snapped uncharacteristically.
She drew back, startled. Nothing ever flustered Nick. He was always the soul of gentlemanly composure.
“I’m sorry.” He sighed. “I have no past. It’s over and gone. My life started anew when you rescued me. This is who I am now. You are my life. You and the kids.”
She appreciated the sentiment, but he was going to have to face his past eventually. The psychiatrists had told her repeatedly not to push him, to let him investigate his previous life at his own speed. But it had about killed her to contain her curious nature for so long.
The lawyers’ badgering resumed, continuing until Nick finally declared, “Gentlemen, this line of questioning is over. My past is not relevant to the fact that I spent five years in an AbaCo box on an AbaCo ship at the hands of kidnappers in the employ of AbaCo.”
Laura stared. It was the first time he’d shown even a flash of the decisive streak he’d had in abundance in Paris.
Carter replied mildly, “AbaCo’s lawyers will, without question, go on a fishing expedition into your past in hopes of finding something they can make seem relevant.”
Nick scowled. “As far as I know, I never had anything to do with AbaCo before I wound up on that damned ship.”
The lawyer sighed. “President Nixon’s lawyers had the eighteen-minute gap to explain. We’ve got your five-year blackout to overcome. Have your doctors said anything more about the chances of you regaining some portion of your memory?”
Nick shrugged. “They think everything’s gone for good. I remember Laura’s face, and that’s it.”
“Can’t you remember something from before your memory loss to give you a clue about who you are and what you do?”
“I know who I am and what I do. I’m Nick Cass, and I spend every waking moment enjoying my family.”
The lawyer looked regretful, but said firmly, “You’re going to be under oath at the trial, and I guarantee they’ll ask you for explicit details of your past. If you won’t talk, they’ll have investigators dig up everything they can find.”
Laura observed closely as Nick’s gaze went hard. Closed. He’d never talked with her about his past in Paris before he disappeared, either. What was the big secret? She’d lay odds he wasn’t a criminal. She’d worked with plenty of them over the years, and he just didn’t have the right personality for it. He was too honorable, too concerned about doing the right thing.
The lawyers started up again, asking about Nick’s connection to AbaCo. He stuck firmly to his story that he’d never had any dealings with AbaCo that he was aware of, and knew of nothing that would’ve provoked the shipping giant to kidnap him of its own volition. Nick maintained steadfastly that his had to have been strictly a kidnapping for hire.
Frankly, she agreed with him. Laura tapped a pencil idly on the pad of paper before her. With first his long months of physical and emotional recovery and then the new baby coming, she’d been distracted enough this past year to abide by his wishes to leave his past alone. But she felt an investigation coming on.
Somebody’d messed with the father of her children, and that meant they’d messed with her. Furthermore, that person or persons might still pose a threat to her man. She smiled wryly. Her mama bear within was in full force these days. Must be the baby hormones raging.
She listened with a mixture of anger and sadness as Nick tonelessly described his incarceration. The psychologists said he had completely disassociated himself from his imprisonment and would have to make peace with it in his own time. For now, though, he held the emotions at arm’s length.
The lawyers moved on to the night of Nick’s rescue. He didn’t have a lot to say about it other than his door opened and a man named Jagger Holtz let him out, and Holtz and Laura led him to safety.
The lawyers left alone the events to follow Nick’s rescue—his weeks in a hospital recovering from various illnesses and malnutrition, his paranoia, the long silences, his difficulties with crowds and open spaces. None of that would help AbaCo’s case, apparently.
Then the lawyers attacked the veracity of Nick’s whole story, claiming it was entirely too far-fetched to be true, doing their damnedest to trip him up or get him to contradict himself. The only evidence he had of this supposed capture of his was a grainy video that could just as easily have been faked, and they demanded to know why he had it in for AbaCo.
She was ready to explode herself by the time Nick surged up out of his chair. “Why do I have to withstand this sort of character assassination? I’m the victim here! And now you make me a victim a second time!”
Carter nodded soberly. “You are correct. It’s the nature of our legal system that the victim often endures outright assault in the courtroom. That’s what we’re here to prepare you to face.”
Nick shoved a hand through his hair. “Why exactly do I have to testify?”
“Because AbaCo will try to convince the jury that the video is faked. The government has to have your direct testimony that the events on the tape are real.”
“Other people were there that night. Why not put my rescuers on the stand?” He sent Laura a quick, apologetic look, no doubt at the notion of dumping this mess into her lap. Not that she minded. She’d love to say a thing or two about AbaCo to a jury.
Carter grinned. “AbaCo won’t touch Laura with a ten-foot pole. She’s a former government agent, which gives her credibility, and they bloody well don’t want to give her a chance to vent her righteous fury in front of a jury…. The mother of your child alone and frantic for years? Oh, no. Way too damaging a story for AbaCo.”
He omitted the part where the government prosecutors wouldn’t put her on the stand because she’d illegally obtained most of the information that led to Nick’s rescue. They’d rather not open up that can of worms for AbaCo to pry into.
After his outburst, Nick settled into stoic silence, refusing to respond to any of the leading and obnoxious questions the lawyers threw at him. No matter what they tried, they couldn’t shake him. Laura was proud of him, but she didn’t like the way he was hunching into his chair, physically withdrawing into himself. He was approaching overload but too macho to admit it.
Thankfully, Ellie woke up and gave Nick the excuse he clearly needed to call a halt for the day. Laura gathered up their fussing daughter apologetically and adjourned to the minivan to nurse and change her.
Nick came outside a few minutes later and stopped by the van to tell her to drive carefully. With troubled eyes, she watched him guide his sporty BMW out of the parking lot. A worrisome, brittle quality clung to him.
Ahh, well. She would make that all go away tonight. The nanny had instructions to entertain the kids for the evening, leaving her and Nick to enjoy a romantic dinner by themselves in the master suite. Smiling, she turned out of the parking lot and pointed the minivan south toward the rolling hills of Virginia’s horse country and home.
Nick drove like a man possessed. Heck, maybe he was possessed. What madness was this to subject himself to cross-examination under oath with as many secrets as he clearly had to hide?
If Laura ever found out he wasn’t who he said he was …
She couldn’t find out. Period. He had too good a thing going, they had too good a thing going, to let anyone mess it up. As appealing as revenge against the bastards who’d held him captive might be, it was a no-brainer that his family came first. He’d made that choice months ago, and he’d had no reason to regret it since.
Someone honked at him. He jerked his attention back to the highway and the traffic streaming along it. He could do this. He could hold himself and his life together. One day at time. One hour or one minute at a time if that’s what it took. The only honest and good things in his life were Laura and the kids. He wasn’t about to lose them.
As the city turned into suburbs and the suburbs into open countryside, his jumpiness increased. After all that time in a shipping container, he’d have thought he would love nothing more than big, blue skies and broad horizons stretching away into infinity. But it turned out the exact opposite was the case. He’d become so used to living in a tiny, mostly dark space that anything else seemed strange and scary.
The panic attack started with sweaty palms and clenching the steering wheel until his knuckles hurt. Then his forehead broke out in a sweat, and an urge to crawl under a blanket in the backseat nearly overcame him.
As Laura’s estate came into view, he stopped the car and parked by the side of the road. He had to pull himself together before he got home and scared her or the kids. He hyperventilated until he saw spots before he managed to slow his breathing. He concentrated on Adam’s laughter, on Ellie’s tiny perfection, on Laura’s warm brown eyes looking at him with such love it made his heart hurt.
Gradually, his pulse slowed. He mopped his forehead dry. There wasn’t anything he could do about his sweat-soaked shirt, but hopefully Laura would put it down to the grilling earlier from the lawyers. Relishing the car’s smooth purr, he put it into gear.
After keying in his security code he drove through the tall iron gates, as always enjoying the bucolic sight of Laura’s prized horses grazing in manicured pastures behind freshly painted oak fences. As he pulled into the six-car garage, he was relieved to see that Laura’s van wasn’t inside yet.
Mumbling a greeting to Marta, the housekeeper, he hurried upstairs to take a shower. The enclosed shower stall with its rain-heads and steam jets soothed away the last remnants of his panic attack. When he emerged from his dressing room/walk-in closet, he heard Laura cooing to Ellie in the nursery. She was a great mom. It added a whole new dimension to the courageous woman who’d rescued him and spent the past year saving his soul.
He poked his head into the nursery. “Anything I can do to help?”
Laura smiled up at him. “I’m afraid you lack the proper anatomical equipment to provide what Ellie wants at the moment.” He gazed at his daughter’s silky, dark head nestled against the pale globe of Laura’s breast. He might have missed Adam’s babyhood—another outrage to lay at his kidnappers’ feet—but he was savoring every minute of Ellie’s.
“Dinner will be ready in a half hour,” Laura murmured. “I’ve asked Marta to serve it in our rooms.”
He nodded and retreated to the other end of the hall to play with Adam. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sleep with Laura. Far from it. She was as generous and adventurous in bed as she was in life. It was just that he was still rattled from the interrogation, panicked that his past was about to rear its ugly head and ruin all of this perfection. What had happened during those lost years to make him hide his identity, even from the woman he loved?
“Daddeeeeeee!”
Grinning, he braced himself as Adam launched into the air and splatted against Nick’s chest. He caught his son’s small, wriggly form against his, savoring the smell of soap that clung to the boy’s still-damp hair.
“Did you do anything fun today?” he asked as Adam dragged him over to the corner to play with the toy du jour—Hot Wheels race cars.
Adam described his day in charming detail while the two of them built an elaborate racetrack. With dark hair and blue-on-blue eyes so like his own, Adam bent over the task with concentration far beyond his years. He was a frighteningly intelligent child and would go far in life if he used his talents to their maximum potential. They laughed together as too tight a turn sent cars shooting off the track and across the room in spectacular crashes.
Lisbet, the English and shockingly Mary Poppins-like nanny, interrupted the crash fest to announce that Adam’s dinner, and Mummy and Daddy’s, were served. Nick gave his son a bear hug and tickled him until Adam was squealing with laughter before turning him over to Lisbet.
Nick stepped into the private sitting room in their suite and stopped in surprise. The space was lit by hundreds of candles and a white-linen-covered table sat alone in the middle. A red rose in a crystal bud vase sat between the two place settings, and a sumptuous meal was laid out. Marta had really outdone herself. It was some sort of exotic fowl served en croute—grouse, maybe. Among other things, the German woman was a Cordon Bleu-trained chef. A real treasure. But then Laura didn’t settle for less than the best in any aspect of her life. She’d be as intimidating as hell if she weren’t such a genuinely warm and kind person. No doubt about it. He didn’t deserve her.
Laura stepped out of her dressing room and his breath caught. She was wearing a little black dress that highlighted her newly slender body, which had already mostly regained its pre-pregnancy shape partly due to long hours with a personal trainer over the past month. Frankly, the additional curves added to her appeal.
“You look ravishing,” he announced.
“And you are as handsome as always,” she replied as he held her chair for her.
Something within her called to him at a fundamental level, a pull at his soul to protect her and make her happy. It went so far beyond mere attraction he didn’t know how to give it a name. Even calling it love didn’t seem adequate to encompass his need for her or the bond he felt with her. Maybe it was sharing parenthood of two amazing children.
Or maybe it was the fact that he owed his life to her. He would never forget the sight of her the night he was freed. His own private angel. And then the long months of patiently nursing him back to health, gradually convincing him his ordeal was actually over. Putting up with his unwillingness to face his past. And through it all, her love had been steadfast.
He wondered sometimes if there was anything that could shake her loyalty to him. What was it that lurked so dark and frightening in his past? Was it bad enough to drive her away? It really wasn’t something he wanted to find out.
“How are you holding up after being raked over the coals by those lawyers?” Laura asked.
He shrugged. “Today wasn’t fun. But I expect the trial will be worse.”
She sighed. “It’ll all be over in a few weeks, and then we can get on with our lives.”
His gaze dropped involuntarily to her naked left hand. She never once hinted at it, but she had to be thinking about marriage and wondering why he never brought it up. The truth was, he didn’t know if he was married or not, and the only way to find out would be to investigate those ominous, lost years.
He picked up his water glass—since Laura couldn’t drink wine while nursing, he wasn’t drinking either—and said, “A toast. To a long and happy future for us and our family.”
She sipped her water and then asked reflectively, “Why don’t you ever talk about the past?”
He frowned. “I’ve told you why.” Repeatedly, in fact.
“I’m concerned that, with all the publicity this trial’s going to receive, whoever had you kidnapped five years ago will see you and come after you again.”
He swore mentally. He hadn’t thought about the publicity. Was there some way to declare a moratorium on filming or photographing him during the trial?
“Talk to me, Nick. Between the two of us, we can beat any threat that comes our way.”
A naïve notion at best. “My previous life happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Let it be.”
“The psychiatrists keep telling me to let you deal with your imprisonment and the memory loss in your own time. But I have a gut feeling that your time is running out.”
So did he.
Thankfully, she let the subject drop. For now. He had no doubt she would bring it up again, though. And one of these days, she wasn’t going to back off. She’d insist they find answers. His throat tightened until he could hardly swallow the delicious food. What the hell was he going to do? His entire being shied away from thinking about the past. What could have freaked him out at such a soul-deep level? He put the problem in a mental drawer and slammed it shut. Later. He’d think about it later.
They finished eating, and he changed the music. “Dance with me?” he asked her.
“I thought you’d never ask, Mr. Cass.”
Nick held a hand out to her and she took it, rising gracefully to her feet. She wasn’t particularly tall, but she made up for it by being impossibly elegant in build. He might not remember meeting her, but he had no trouble understanding why he’d fallen for her the first time around. Or the second time around. He figured falling in love with the same woman twice was proof positive he’d chosen the right one.
She came into his arms, soft and willing and smelling of Chanel No. 5, his favorite. “Have I told you today that I love you?” he murmured as they swayed to the slow jazz tune.
“I do believe you’ve been remiss in that department.”
“My sincere apologies. Perhaps I can show you how much I love you instead?”
She laughed. “I really never thought you’d ask that. I was beginning to think you didn’t miss making love with me.”
“Ahh, sweet Laura. I was only trying to think of your health. I will want to make love to you until the day I die.”
“Here’s hoping that’s a very long time from now.”
He smiled down at her. “I don’t know about you, but I’m planning to live to be one hundred and fifty years old.”
“That sounds like a plan.”
They danced in silence after that, letting anticipation build between them. Finally, he turned her in his arms toward the bedroom. Her dress had a long zipper, which he drew down by slow degrees as they went, his fingers dipping inside to relish her satin skin and the inward curve of her back. Gratitude swelled in his heart for whatever fate had brought them together.
For her part, Laura tugged his shirt clear of his trousers and made a slow production of unbuttoning it, kissing her way down his chest button by button. His stomach muscles contracted hard as she approached his belt buckle. Her clever fingers did away with that barrier, and then he was sucking in his breath hard, falling back onto the bed when she pushed him gently. She’d obviously given tonight a great deal of thought, and he was happy to go along with her plans for them. For now, at least.
She took her time, teasing him until his entire body thrummed with terrible tension. Finally he rolled over to return the favor. He kissed every inch of her body, re-acquainting himself with it, enjoying the new firmness across her flat stomach, loving the extra fullness in her breasts—and the added sensitivity that came with it. Her soft gasps of pleasure were just as he remembered, the way she arched up into his hands, the fire in her eyes as he stroked her body until it sang for him.
A shadow of fear crossed his mind, but he shoved it away. Nothing must hurt her. Hurt them. He ordered himself to stay in the moment. Focus on the now. “You drive me out of my mind,” he muttered against her skin. “I’ll never get enough of you.”
Moaning as his fingers made magic upon her body, she pulled him down to her impatiently. “Nick,” she gasped, “Please. I’ve waited so long for you. I want you now.”
Ahh, always direct, his Laura. “I could never deny you what you want, my love.”
Taking into consideration her long abstinence, he entered her gently, stunned at how tight and slick she was. She surged up against him immediately, crying out in pleasure. Her eyes glazed the way they always did when they made love, and he relished the way she bit her lower lip. As if she’d actually be able to hold back the cries of pleasure about to claim her. He withdrew slightly and then filled her again in a single slow stroke. She cried out against his shoulder, shuddering from head to foot.
He smiled down at her. “Let us see just how much pleasure you can stand, shall we?”
He paced himself carefully, driving her farther and farther over the edge. With each climax, her smile became more brilliant, her eyes more limpid, his own pleasure more intense. And the happier he became, the more afraid he became. He drove himself mercilessly, forcing himself not to think of the darkness creeping up on him, holding it back from Laura by sheer force of will.
Finally, when his mental strength was at an end, the battle lost, he gave in to the dark tide sweeping over him, surging into her, driving her over the edge one last time. As they climaxed together, it was so magnificent and terrible that, as tears of joy ran down her face, he wasn’t far from tears himself. Tears of sheer terror. The better things were between them, the more certain he was that all of it could end at any moment.
He was losing it. Happiness made him unhappy. Joy terrified him. It was all coming apart before his eyes, his life unraveling because he was too screwed up just to enjoy what they had. But he couldn’t shake the sense of something bad approaching, something stealthy and evil. And it was coming for him.
“I love you, Nick.” Her gaze was clear, untroubled. She sensed nothing, and she had the finely honed instincts of a CIA agent. Desperate, he ordered himself to hold on. Keep it together. He mustn’t lose what little sanity he had.
He rolled to his side, propping himself up on one elbow to gaze down at her. “I love you, too, darling.” Must concentrate on that. Laura. Love. The darkness retreated a little from his mind. His left hand idly stroked down her rosy body. “Better?” he murmured.
“Spectacular. I feel like a woman again.”
He leaned down to kiss her. “You were always a woman. A beautiful one. You’re an amazing mother, and it only makes you sexier.”
“You’re just saying that to be polite.”
“No, I’m not.” He frowned. “Never doubt your attractiveness. The more sides of you I see, the more attracted to you I am.”
“Never change, Nick.”
If only. He felt as if he’d been living in a state of suspended animation for the past year. As if time was passing, but he wasn’t really living. As Laura drifted to sleep beside him, the darkness pushed forward again, nearly choking him with certainty that this sweet interlude was about to end, and life was about to come looking for him with payback in mind.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_fedf9398-0319-532b-b046-c2c60744f0ca)
The bedside clock had passed 2 a.m. when Nick gave up on sleep. He slid out from under the covers and dressed quietly, tiptoeing downstairs in anticipation of Ellie’s imminent feeding. He pulled a bottle of pumped breast milk out of the refrigerator, warmed it in the microwave and went back upstairs.
Turning off the baby monitor, he sat down in the rocking chair to wait. Sure enough, in about ten minutes, the baby started to stir. He picked her up, inhaling the sweet scent of her. “Good evening, little angel. What say we let Mommy sleep tonight?”
Ellie, a happy and cooperative baby, readily took the bottle from him, snuggling close against his chest with a trust that took his breath away. He loved Laura with all his being, but the feelings that swelled in his heart as he gazed down at his daughter pushed his capacity for love to new heights he’d heretofore had no idea existed. Adoration mixed with protectiveness, hope for her future, and wonder at the miracle of her existence expanded in his heart to make room for his tiny daughter.
He changed her as she grew sleepy and rocked her for just a minute or two before her eyes closed. He laid her down gently in her crib and watched her sleep until it dawned on him that he was standing there grinning like a blessed fool.
Restless, he wandered downstairs. Predictably, his feet carried him to his office. Or more accurately to his laptop computer. He sat down at his desk in the dark and cranked it up. He didn’t stop to question what he was doing. It was time.
He typed in the name, Nikolas Spiros, and hit the search button. Skipping the tabloids, he read story after story from the business pages chronicling the tragic mental breakdown of Greece’s richest shipping magnate. There were even pictures of him, bearded and wild looking. Abrupt memory flashed of his captors hanging a white sheet in his box and taking pictures of him standing in front of it. Bastards.
According to the articles, he’d been institutionalized at a private facility. Later stories talked about his withdrawal from public life. His wish to live quietly and not involve himself with business affairs. How in the hell could anyone who’d known him have believed that drivel? He’d loved running Spiros Shipping. Had thrived on it. The company had been his life, dammit!
He checked his anger. Nikolas Spiros was dead—or at least resting comfortably in an asylum and happy to stay there.
His shipping company had been sold quietly about a year after his “breakdown.” Such a pleasant word for such an unpleasant thing as kidnapping. An entirely new management group had taken over the company. A bunch of Germans. They’d renamed it—
His heart nearly stopped right then and there. Spiros Shipping had been renamed AbaCo. The betrayal of it was breathtaking. He’d been kidnapped and held by his own employees! Had they known who he was? Had he been that bad a boss? Surely not. Morale had been great at Spiros before his memory went black. A sense of family had pervaded the firm. Sure, the work had been hard and times were tough, but he’d prided himself in never laying off an employee and paying as much as he could afford to every single worker. Surely so much hadn’t changed after his memories stopped that his employees would have turned on him so violently and completely.
In shock, he researched the financials of his renamed company. Profits were down, but AbaCo was still in the black. He shrugged. It would have been darned hard not to make money given how financially sound the company had been when he last remembered it. He studied the quarterly earnings reports for the past few years and cracks were definitely starting to show. But nothing that couldn’t be corrected with wise and careful management for a few years—
Not his company any more.
At least not in any way that mattered. He had Laura and the kids. And at all costs, this other part of his life had to be kept away from them. The new owners could have Spiros Shipping.
Best to just stay hidden. A ghost.
But how in the hell was he supposed to do that with this trial coming up?
What had happened to Nikolas Spiros? Had he gone mad for real? Had something horrible happened at the shipping company that had driven him over the edge? What would leave such a residue of terror within him?
The walls of his office started to close in on him unpleasantly—which was a first—and he actually felt a driving need to get out of there. He erased his browsing history and shut down the computer before heading for the kitchen.
Pulling on a jacket, he turned off the elaborate security system and headed out the back door toward the woods behind the house. Tonight he didn’t feel up to trekking across one of the pastures and challenging his agoraphobia. He’d been taking secret hikes for several months now, trying to desensitize himself to open spaces. It was getting better, but by maddeningly slow degrees.
He’d been walking for a few minutes when the panic attack hit. It slammed into him like a freight train, sudden and overwhelming. He stopped, breathing as if he’d been sprinting, and glanced around in terror. And then something odd dawned on him. This panic attack was different. It was accompanied by a strange certainty that he was being watched. Great. Was he slipping back into the paranoia of the early days, too?
He couldn’t help himself. He slid into the darkest shadow he could find and crouched, pressing his back against the trunk of a huge sycamore. He let his gaze roam, his peripheral vision taking in a wide angle view of the woods. The night sounds had gone dead silent. Maybe he wasn’t so paranoid, after all. The crickets never lied.
Who else was out here? And why?
The motion sensors at the house would warn of any human-sized intruders … if he hadn’t turned the alarm system off before he came out here. He swore at himself. Laura and the kids were unprotected. He had to get back to the house. Get the alarms back on. Protect his family.
He stood up and was stunned to discover his feet wouldn’t move. Literally. By sheer force of will, he overcame his panic, ignoring the hyperventilation, ignoring the wild imaginings of being kidnapped again, crammed in another box. His family came first, dammit. He’d die for them!
His stumbling walk turned into a jog, and finally into a full-out run. Whether he was running toward Laura or away from the bogeyman in the woods, he couldn’t say. But either way, his long legs devoured the distance with powerful strides and his lungs burned with exertion by the time the mansion came into sight. Its Georgian grandeur was dark. Quiet. Undisturbed.
The silliness of his terror struck him forcefully. His mind was playing tricks on him. It was only his past pursuing him. A figment of his imagination. With a last look over his shoulder into the shadows of the night, he let himself into the house and turned on the security system.
Shaken to his core, he climbed the stairs quietly. No sense waking everyone because he’d had a panic attack. He put his hand on the doorknob to let himself into the master suite, but he couldn’t bring himself to enter. He was still too wired to lie down beside Laura as if everything was perfectly normal.
Instead, he headed for another door farther down the hall. A small, walk-in linen closet. About six feet by eight feet inside, its tight quarters felt like a comforting embrace. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor, his elbows on his knees and his head on his arms. He had to get over this. Get a grip on himself. But how? If anything, he was getting worse, not better.
As understanding as Laura tried to be, she couldn’t begin to comprehend what he’d been through, what the past few years had been like. It was his own private hell, and no one could climb into it with him and lead him out. He was lost, and getting more lost by the day. Oh, the shrinks said all the right things, but they had no more clue what he’d been through, really, than Laura did. They had a little more book learning about it, had a list of suggestions to offer out of some counseling text, but their psychobabble was mostly crap.
How could everything be so perfect and yet so screwed up? He ought to be insanely happy. But instead, he was marching at a brisk pace toward the mental meltdown he’d been falsely accused of having six years ago.
There hadn’t been anyone in the woods. A deer or some other creature had moved, and the crickets had gone quiet for a minute. He’d flipped out over nothing. So why was his fight-or-flight response still in full readiness? He took several deep, calming breaths, the way the yoga instructor had taught him, breathing out the fear and stress.
It accomplished exactly nothing, dammit.
He sat there, panting in terror for who knew how long when, without warning, the door swung open. He started to surge to his feet when a little voice whispered, “Daddy?”
Nick sank back down to the floor, his heart about pounding through his rib cage. “Hey, buddy. What are you doing up at this hour?”
“I dreamed a bad man was coming for me.”
He held out an arm to Adam, who wasted no time climbing into his lap. “No bad man will ever get you. Mommy and I will always protect you and keep you safe.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?” Adam added.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he repeated. “Need a pinkie swear on it, too?”
Adam held out his right pinkie finger, and Nick hooked his much larger finger in his son’s. They shook on it soberly.
“Why are you in the closet, Daddy? Are you hiding from the bad man, too?”
“I didn’t want to wake up you and Ellie and Mommy, and I needed some time to think.”
Adam’s little palms rested on his cheeks. “Is your heart hurting again?”
Since when were five-year-olds so damned perceptive? “I guess it is, a little. I’m so happy it hurts. I think about all the ways it could go wrong …”
Adam nodded wisely. “And then you’re not so happy anymore.”
He stared down at his son, but it was too dark to make out his face. “Nothing’s going to go wrong, Adam. Not if I can help it.”
“Don’t be scared, Daddy.”
“I won’t if you won’t. We can be brave for each other.
Okay?”
Adam nodded against his chest. They cuddled in the dark for several more minutes, and predictably, the boy drifted back to sleep, his nightmare long gone. Nick stood awkwardly, careful not to wake his son, and carried him back to his rocket-ship bed. He tucked the little boy in and kissed his forehead, memorizing Adam’s face in that peaceful moment.
He was going to defeat his own demons if it killed him. No way was he about to let his paranoia bleed over to his children and damage them. And furthermore, his past wasn’t going to hurt them, either. He knew what he had to do. And he had to do it alone. Leaving no note that Laura could use to track him down, he treaded quietly back down the stairs, this time being sure to reactivate the alarm from the panel in the garage, and headed out into the night.
* * *
Laura woke up to Ellie’s fussing amplified through the baby monitor, disoriented at how well rested she felt and that the first light of dawn was peeking in around the curtains. She looked at the clock. Six o’clock? Nick must’ve taken the 2:00 a.m. feeding, bless him. She rolled over to thank him and was startled to see his side of the bed empty. He hadn’t struggled with insomnia for months, now.
Shrugging, she got up, threw on a bathrobe and headed for her daughter. Ellie was hungry, and nursed for longer than usual. Laura carried her into the bathroom and laid her on a big soft bath towel on the heated floor while Mommy jumped into the shower. She dressed herself and Ellie and headed downstairs in search of Nick.
He wasn’t in the kitchen watching the financial news and drinking coffee, as was his habit. She strolled through the entire downstairs and didn’t find him. Had he crawled into bed with Adam sometime last night? He did that now and then when Adam had a particularly scary nightmare. The boy had had periodic bouts with them ever since a team of killers had broken into the house after Nick’s rescue in search of her and Nick. Thankfully, the babysitter had gotten them into the mansion’s panic room and locked it down before Adam was hurt or worse. But the incident had left its mark on the little boy.
She headed upstairs and peeked into Adam’s room. He was sleeping alone. A low-level hum of alarm started in Laura’s gut. She checked the linen closet and Nick’s walk-in closet. No sign of him.
She pulled out her cell phone and dialed his. Not in service? What was going on? She ran down to the garage to check the cars—they were all in their places. The alarm system was still on, too. Where had he gone? He hated being outdoors. It wasn’t like he’d have gone for a morning stroll.
Starting at one end of the house, she searched it methodically, checking every place a grown man could possibly hide. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
Memories of Paris flashed through her head with horrifying clarity. How he’d just disappeared. No trace. No evidence. No ransom call. Nothing. He’d just been gone. Please, God. Not again. She couldn’t live through losing him again. Not like that.
An hour later, she was on the phone to the police and local hospitals. Nada. And then she started calling their friends and associates, the early hour of the morning be damned. No one had seen or heard from him overnight. Panic hovered, vulture-like, waiting to close in on her.
Adam came downstairs and didn’t help matters one bit by immediately picking up on her stress. The child was far too observant for his own good sometimes. “What’s wrong, Mommy? Where’s Daddy?”
“I don’t know, honey. But there’s nothing to worry about.”
Adam frowned. “His heart is hurting again.”
She turned on the child quickly. “Why do you say that, sweetie?”
“He was in the towel closet again last night.”
“When last night?”
Adam shrugged. “It was dark. I had a bad dream and was coming to sleep with you. I heard him breathing funny in there.”
“What did he say?” She tried not to sound hysterical but suspected she’d failed when Adam frowned worriedly.
“He promised he’d keep me safe from the bad man. He pinkie swore.” The little boy started to cry. “The bad man got him, didn’t he?”
She gathered him into her arms. “Daddy? Are you kidding? He’s big and strong and smart. No bad man has a chance against your daddy.”
But the bad man had gotten Nick once before. Had history sickeningly repeated itself? Had he been ghosted out of their lives yet again?
Chapter 4 (#ulink_0ab13e3e-2f2e-50ad-8f2e-de58c07a8b8a)
“May I help you, sir?” The receptionist at the swanky Boston law firm was predictably beautiful and efficient.
Nick replied, “I’m here to see William Ward.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, and please don’t tell him I’m here. It’s a surprise.” He flashed his most charming smile at her. He wasn’t vain about his looks, but very few women could resist him when he turned the charm all the way up.
She simpered something about being delighted to help. He waved off her offer to show him the way and strode down the familiar hallways. A feeling akin to déjà vu passed over him. This place was from another existence, another life, familiar and yet entirely strange to him.
He stepped into Ward’s office and the man glanced up. “Sweet Jesus!” he gasped, falling back in his chair heavily. “Is that really you?”
Nick closed the door and stepped up to the desk. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, William.”
“My God. Where have you been? The things they said about you—”
Nick propped his hip on a corner of William’s expansive desk. “What did my kidnappers say to explain my absence, anyway?”
“Kidnappers?” The lawyer stared, aghast. “The reports said you had a mental breakdown. Had to be institutionalized. There were doctor’s statements. Psychological evaluations. Pictures. You looked like hell.”
“Lies. All of it,” Nick said shortly.
William’s shocked pallor was giving way to a sickly shade of green. “Was our power of attorney over your estate illegal, then? What about your signatures on all those sales documents?”
“What documents?”
“The ones signing over your company to the new management group? Were those real?”
“I never signed anything, to my knowledge.” He hoped. Surely he never would have signed away Spiros Shipping under any circumstances.
It took William a few seconds to quit spluttering and form words. “Please forgive me for asking, I mean no disrespect. But have you been in a sufficiently … alert … mental condition for all of the past six years to know for certain that you never signed any legal documents?”
Nick swore under his breath. God only knew what he’d done during the blackout years. “I’m actually not here to talk about my company. And to answer your question, I was kidnapped and imprisoned for five years. It has taken me most of the past year to recover physically from the ordeal.”
The lawyer devolved into a shockingly uncharacteristic bout of mumbling to himself. Poor guy must really be shaken up. Eventually, William collected himself enough to go into attorney mode. “I’m going to need an affidavit from you describing exactly what happened to you in detail. I don’t have any idea how we’re going to contest the sale of your company. It’s going to cause a massive uproar to try to get it back—”
Nick interrupted the man sharply. “I don’t want it back. That’s not why I’m here.”
William stared blankly. “Why are you here, then?”
“I need you to tell me about the last two years before I … disappeared.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Nick sighed. “It’s a long story, but I’ve experienced a memory loss as a result of a blow to the head. I need your help to fill in the gap.”
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
William nodded dubiously. “I’ll do what I can.”
The lawyer started talking and Nick listened grimly. He’d thought if he heard about the lost time it would jog his memory, but none of the names or places or dates rang any bells. His memory wasn’t just buried. It was truly gone. The danger of the black hole loomed even larger as the true depth of it became clear to him.
“I can get all these facts off the internet, William. Tell me what I was like. How I was acting.”
The lawyer spoke of Nikolas growing bored with running a company that functioned like a well-oiled machine pretty much on its own. Of his forays into ever more dangerous hobbies—skydiving, extreme skiing, boat racing, Formula One car racing. He’d apparently blown through a string of beautiful and ever wilder women as well. He’d become a regular on the pages of the European tabloids. And there’d been the partying. Ward didn’t say if he’d dabbled in drinking or drugs, just that the lawyer had been very worried about his longtime client.
Finally, he fell silent.
Nick didn’t even know where to begin processing the information dump he’d just received. It was odd to hear about his own life and feel so completely disconnected from it. Nothing the man had described would account for the pervasive terror that was the only thing he’d carried forward from that time. Nick asked grimly, “Was I—Did I … get married?”
William looked surprised. “There were rumors of a quickie wedding just before you disappeared. But I hadn’t seen you for a few weeks prior to that. I couldn’t say.”
Rumors of a wedding? Nick swore under his breath. “Do you know how I came by the Nick Cass identity?”
The attorney cleared his throat. “During that time, you occasionally preferred to travel under an alias to avoid the publicity and scandal you were generating.”
He had no memory of being assaulted by paparazzi. “Where did the fake ID come from?”
William visibly squirmed at that one. “For the record, I arranged no such thing. I put you in touch with a gentleman who was expert at facilitating replacement of lost identity documents. Perhaps he was the source of your … alter ego.”
Nick dismissed the lawyer’s double-talk with a flick of his wrist. If he was going to keep up the charade of being Nick Cass and no one but Nick Cass, he had to know everything there was to know about the man. Had someone of that name really existed at some point, or was Nick Cass an entirely made-up entity? “I need to get in touch with the fellow who made those documents. I need to know more about the identity he provided for me.”
William frowned. “It’s my understanding he’s no longer in the business. He ran into some legal troubles. Last I heard, he left the country in a hurry. I would have no idea how to get in touch with him.”
Damn. Frustrated, Nick moved over to the floor-to-ceiling glass window to stare down at Boston Harbor. His kidnapper surely knew who he really was. But did the people who’d held him captive? Did the powers-that-be at AbaCo? Had it been an inside job, or had his kidnappers merely had a sick sense of humor to have imprisoned him on one of his own ships?
If AbaCo’s lawyers penetrated the Cass identity, they would come after him with both barrels, and the sum total of what he knew about his last years before his capture he’d just heard from the man behind him. He turned to William. “Can you recommend a top-flight private investigator to me? Someone thorough and discreet.”
“Of course.” William looked close to puking in relief that Nick didn’t pursue the fake ID thing any further. As Nick recalled, William had been paid plenty well enough back then that he could darn well suffer a little for the cause now.
“Oh, and one more thing, William.”
The lawyer looked up sharply from the sticky note on which he was copying a name and phone number.
“Don’t tell anyone you’ve seen me. Consider this little visit a privileged interaction between the two of us. As far as you know, I’m still sitting in a padded cell somewhere, staring at my toes and drooling down my chin. Got it?”
The attorney frowned. “I understand. Actually, I don’t understand, but I will abide by your wishes.”
“Thanks, William.”
“Will you tell me the whole story someday?”
“If things go well, you’ll never see or hear from me again.” As the finality of that struck Nick he made brief eye contact with the attorney who’d been a friend and confidante for many years. “Thanks for everything. You’re a good man.”
“You, too. If you ever need anything, just let me know. And good luck.”
Nick turned and left the office. Good luck, indeed. He’d probably need a bona fide miracle before it was all said and done to avoid the clutches of his past.
He waited until he was back in Washington D.C., leaving Reagan International Airport to drive home, before he called Laura. She had too many scary resources with which to track him down for him to risk calling her any sooner. She would be completely freaked out by now, but he’d had no choice. He had to deal with his past on his own. And after hearing what William Ward had to say about his last years leading up to his capture, it had turned out to be a damned good call to keep Laura and the kids far away from the mess he’d apparently made of his life.
Laura answered her cell phone on the first ring with a terse hello.
“Hello, darling. It’s me.”
“Thank God, Nick. Are you all right? Are you hurt? Where are you?”
He felt terrible hearing her panic and relief. Good Lord willing, he’d never scare her like this again. “I’m fine. I’ll be home in about an hour. There was something I had to take care of.”
A pause. “Can you talk to me about it?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. But it’s handled. No worries.” At least he hoped there was nothing to worry about. The P.I. he’d spoken to in Boston had been confident he could find everything that had ever existed on one Nick Cass prior to six years ago. If the man had ever actually existed, Nick would know all about him in a few days.
The cab delivered him to the mansion’s front door in closer to two hours than one—there’d been an accident and traffic was hellish. As he stepped inside, Adam shouted a greeting that warmed Nick all the way to his soul. Laura held herself to a walk as she came to greet him, but she squeezed him so tightly it hurt and he thought he felt a sob shake her momentarily.
“I’m sorry, darling. I knew you’d want to go with me, but I had to take care of a piece of old business on my own.”
Her muffled voice rose from his chest. “Did you kill anyone?”
“No,” he laughed.
“Are we okay?”
His arms tightened convulsively around her. “That’s the whole idea. I love you and the children more than life.” They stood locked together like they’d never let go of each other for a long time. Finally, he murmured, “Am I forgiven?”
“Of course. I could never stay mad at you. If you say you had to do something, then you had to do it. If you can’t talk about it with me, there’s a good reason for that, too. And if you say you love me, I believe you.”
He tilted her chin up to kiss her. “I am, without question, the luckiest man on Earth to have you.”
She stood on tiptoe to kiss him back. “And don’t you ever forget it,” she murmured.
“Never.” Their lips met, and the passion that always simmered between them boiled over immediately. His mouth slanted across hers, and she clung to him eagerly.
“Eeyew! Gross!” Adam exclaimed from the steps above them.
Nick lifted his mouth away from Laura’s and smiled up at his son. “For now, you hold on to that thought, young man. But trust me. In a few years, girls won’t be nearly so disgusting.”
“But Mommy’s not a girl. She’s a … mommy.”
Laura laughed in Nick’s arms. “Gee, thanks, kid.” She scooped up Adam and swung him around until they were all laughing.
And just like that, life was back to the way it was supposed to be. As Nick followed his family toward the kitchen, he experienced an overwhelming sensation of having dodged a bullet.
The sensation lasted exactly one hour. That was when Carter Tatum called to inform him that he was to appear at a pre-trial hearing in three days’ time. Three days for the private investigator to give him enough ammunition to hold off a pack of sharks out to tear him to pieces. It was almost enough to make him reconsider enlisting Laura’s prodigious skill with computers to help him research his Nick Cass identity.
Almost. But not quite.
Laura understood Nick’s nervousness as his first encounter with AbaCo’s lawyers loomed only a few hours away. But there was something else going on with him. He kept checking his cell phone like he was expecting a message, and the longer it didn’t come, the more tense he was quietly becoming. It took knowing him exceedingly well to see the signs of his stress—the tightness around his eyes, the absent quality to some of his comments, the very occasional twitch of a thumb. She had to give Nick credit. He had amazing self-discipline to give away so little as a limousine whisked the two of them toward Washington, D.C.
His self-control held through the hearing, but he wasn’t put on the witness stand and grilled, either. The legal proceeding mostly consisted of motions and technical arguments between the lawyers. As far as she could tell, they were wrangling over the rules of engagement for the trial to come. All in all, it was rather anticlimactic.
The hearing was adjourned, and Nick joined her in the aisle, looping an arm over her shoulder as they stepped outside …
… into a barrage of lights and microphones and shouted questions.
Nick reared back hard beside her, going board stiff. The Tatum team of attorneys leaped forward to intercept the phalanx of reporters, but it was too late. The press had spotted Nick. The story of his kidnapping and rescue had made a brief sensation last year, but thanks to his inability at the time to give interviews and put a poster-boy face to the story, it had faded quickly.
Unfortunately, the media had put two and two together, and they wanted the scoop on the miracle man now. Laura was half-blinded by flashing lights exploding at them from all directions. Good thing she was completely out of her old line of work. One media assault like this would’ve blown her cover permanently.
Nick swore quietly beside her. To the lawyers, he said tersely, “Get us out of here. Now.”
The Tatum support team hustled her and Nick down the front steps and into the waiting limousine. He collapsed on the plush upholstery, swearing steadily under his breath in what sounded like Greek. What was up with that?
The car door closed, and silence descended around them.
He yanked out his cell phone and punched in a number. She caught only the first few digits—617 area code. Boston?
“It’s Nick Cass,” said into the device tersely. “What have you got for me?”
He listened in silence for a long time, his jaw clenching tighter with each passing minute. And then he finally ordered, “Keep looking.”
“Who was that?” Laura asked as he put away his phone.
He looked up at her grimly. It was like staring into the eyes of a total stranger. Cold shock washed over her. Who was this man sitting beside her? She couldn’t ever recall seeing that expression of irritation or determination in his gaze before.
He answered tightly, “That was my past.”
She waited for him to elaborate but was immensely frustrated when he didn’t. It was all she could do not to demand answers right this second. But she’d vowed when she found him to just be grateful that he was alive and accept whatever part of him he chose to share with her, no questions asked. But, darn, that was hard to stick to now!
The ride home was silent, with him lost in his thoughts, and her convincing herself to respecting his privacy. She would not turn her investigative skills on the father of her children, the man she loved with all her heart. She would trust him and take him at his word and support him. But her fingers literally itched to start typing, to dig into the internet and tap her network of resources built up over years of hunting down disappeared and deadbeat dads.
At dinner that night, she and Nick let Adam dominate the conversation with an eager description of his outing with Nanny Lisbet to Colonial Williamsburg that afternoon. Afterwards, Adam went upstairs with Lisbet to take a bath, and Laura and Nick adjourned to the family room. Nick flipped on the news.
Laura started violently as his face flashed up on the flat-screen TV at several times larger than life size. He froze on the sofa beside her.
The reporter narrated over footage from the courthouse this afternoon, recapping the story of Nick’s rescue from a container ship a year before and moving on to report in detail how federal prosecutors were going after several high-ranking AbaCo executives for their roles in Nick’s kidnapping. The reporter devolved into speculating on how high in the company the complicity reached.
Nick turned off the TV, scowling ferociously.
Laura commented soothingly, “It was an essentially accurate report. You came off completely sympathetically. You’re an innocent victim of a heinous crime. And I have to say, you’re incredibly photogenic. The public is going to love you.” She smiled. “Particularly women.”
His scowl deepened and he leaped up off the sofa to pace. He kept mumbling something under his breath that sounded like, “Not good. They’ll see me.”
“Who’ll see you?” she asked carefully.
When he turned to stare at her, it was like looking into the eyes of a wild creature, hunted and cornered. “Everything will be ruined,” he bit out. And with that, he stormed out of the room.
Laura eyed her laptop computer. Just a quick search. Nothing in depth. A brief check to see if something about his past would pop up. No, darn it! She headed for the gym in the basement to drown her temptation in some good old-fashioned sweat.
Nick was restless that night. To her vast disappointment, he didn’t come to bed when she did, and the clock was turning toward 4:00 a.m. when he finally slipped in beside her. His arms went around her and she snuggled into his embrace, pretending to sleep.
But as she lay there in the dark, listening to his quiet breathing, she couldn’t help but wonder who exactly she was in bed with. What in his past had him so frantic? Was he a criminal after all? Who were his enemies? What baggage clung to him? What kind of trouble was he so afraid of bringing to her doorstep? She was a former CIA field agent, for goodness’ sake. What was so bad that he didn’t think she could handle it?
She finally gave up on getting any more rest at around 6 a.m. and eased out of bed quietly so as not to wake Nick. She went to the nursery and scooped up Ellie who, orderly child that she was, was beginning to rouse exactly on time for her 6 a.m. feeding.
“Such a good baby,” Laura crooned as she sat down in the rocking chair in the family room to feed Ellie. As the baby latched on and began sucking hungrily, Laura picked up the remote control and flipped on the TV. Was Nick still the star attraction of the all news channels, or had some real story come along overnight to bump him off the airwaves?
“… reclusive billionaire Nikolas Spiros may have surfaced yesterday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom … appears to be living under a new name … rumors of kidnapping and conspiracy surround his disappearance six years ago after a mental breakdown … unable to contact his people to confirm or deny his identity … you judge for yourself.”
Laura lurched up out of the chair as a photograph of a dashing man in his early thirties was flashed up beside a still picture of Nick yesterday on the courthouse steps.
She knew that younger man very well, indeed. He’d been her lover in Paris six years ago. He was the father of her son. And the man in the other, more recent, picture was the man she lived with now, the father of her daughter. Ellie squawked as she lost her grip on breakfast, and Laura was momentarily distracted resettling the baby.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she murmured. “Mommy was just surprised.”
Although surprised hardly described the sick nausea rumbling through her gut. Nick was a Greek shipping tycoon named Nikolas Spiros? A billionaire? Why had he turned his back on all that? Why did he continue to live under this Nick Cass identity?
Her mind flashed back to Paris. To meeting Nick Cass there. He’d lied to her. He hadn’t told her who he was back then, and he was perpetuating the lie now. No wonder neither she nor her attorney had been able to learn anything about him back then. Nick Cass didn’t exist. The first stirrings of anger started low in her belly, building by steady degrees. Only Ellie’s tiny body nestled against her breast, sucking sleepily, kept her from storming up the stairs and bursting in on Nick—Nikolas—this very second and demanding the full truth and nothing but the truth.
Who in the world was he?
Chapter 5 (#ulink_25db5144-7a21-5a10-8807-2caebf688a9f)
Laura reached her desk just as the phone rang. Who on earth would be calling her at this time of morning? Alarmed, she picked up the receiver.
“Good morning, this is Shelley Hacker from The Morning News Hour. I’m calling to speak to Nikolas Spiros.”
“I’m afraid you have a wrong number.” Laura hung up fast, not giving the reporter time to ask any follow-up questions.
The phone rang again. Oh, Lord. She glanced at the caller ID: unknown caller. She picked the receiver up an inch and set it back down. The feeding frenzy had begun.
“What’s going on?”
Laura whirled to face Nick. “You tell me. The phone’s ringing off the hook with reporters wanting to speak with Nikolas Spiros.”
Beneath his olive complexion, Nick went a sickly shade of gray. He gritted out, “I’m Nick Cass.”
“You are now. I get that. But were you this Spiros guy at some point in your past?”
“My past is dead.”
She gritted her teeth. This was about her and the children as much as it was about him, darn it. She had a family to protect. “I understand your desire to move on. To start a new life. I really do. I support you all the way. But if you were Nikolas Spiros before, you’re going to have to deal with him sometime. What are you going to tell the media?”
“I’ll tell them nothing. It’s none of their business.”
A new hardness, or maybe an old hardness for all she knew, clung to Nick. This was not the gentle, laid-back man she’d spent the past year with. This man resembled much more a savvy, tough businessman who might run a billion-dollar shipping empire. Did she know him at all?
The phone rang again. She glanced at the caller ID and stopped herself at the last second from hanging it up. “It’s Tatum Carter. Your lawyer wants to talk to you … Nikolas.”
Nick sighed and held a hand out for the receiver.
“What the hell’s going on, Nick?”
“Tatum. Good morning. I gather you’ve seen the news?” Nick asked evenly.
“What’s this about you being some Greek billionaire? Hell, you owned AbaCo Shipping until a few years ago. What have you gotten me into?”
Ahh, the ass-covering had commenced. Nick sighed. “If you want to remove yourself from this case, I won’t stop you.”
“No, no,” Tatum quickly replied. “I just want to know what’s going on.”
Nick rolled his eyes. Greed won out, then. He took a certain comfort in knowing what made the attorney tick. And then he jolted as he realized his old, sharklike business instincts were roaring back to the fore. He didn’t want to return to this part of his life, this part of himself.
He glanced up and caught Laura staring at him in equal parts dismay and horror. He was losing her. As sure as he was standing here, she was pulling away from him—from the stranger he’d become. “I’ll call you later, Tatum.”
He hung up on the man without any further ado and sat down beside Laura on the sofa. “I lied to you in Paris.”
“I already figured that out,” she replied dryly. “Why?”
No way was he going to tell her all the things William Ward had revealed to him. There was still a chance he could keep her and the kids out of his past, and he was going to do his darnedest to make that happen. The private investigator had found nothing on any Nick Cass. So far it appeared such a man had never existed. If that held true, his new family was in the clear.
He shrugged. “I apparently created an alter ego for myself. An identity under which I could travel anonymously and unobtrusively. Nick Cass could go into a coffee shop or sit at a café and no one paid any attention to him.”
“Who were you hiding from?” Laura asked shrewdly.
“The media, I imagine. My employees, maybe. Hell, maybe an ex-lover.” He added candidly, “And myself, if I had to guess.”
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
“I expect you fell for Nick Cass, the regular guy, not some Greek billionaire. Knowing you and loving you the way I do now, I’ll bet I wasn’t about to risk what I had with you.”
“So you lied to me? You trusted me so little? Didn’t you think I would understand? Am I that judgmental or just that stupid?”
She didn’t raise her voice, but the anger in it was unmistakable.
“I’m sorry, Laura. I don’t remember any of it. I have no answers for you. Undoubtedly, I was wrong and should have told you everything from the start.”
She threw up her hands. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to be this furious with you and not be able to be mad at you because you can’t remember doing any of it?”
He smiled sadly. “I really am sorry.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Deal with the fallout as best as I can, and when the excitement blows over, go back to being plain old Nick Cass, the man who loves you and our kids.”
“What fallout should I expect from this revelation?”
He grimaced but forced himself to look her squarely in the eye. “I honestly don’t know. But I can tell you this. I plan to do everything in my power to keep you and the kids out of this.”
“This what?”
She was too smart for her own good, sometimes. She’d heard the evasion in his voice and put her finger exactly on the source of his discomfort. “I’ve had a gut feeling since the moment you fished me out of that box that I should let sleeping dogs lie. I feel that way more strongly than ever. It’s nothing concrete. Just a feeling.”
He reached out and took her icy hands in his. “I don’t know what’s hidden in those lost five years, I swear. But I think it’s bad, and I think it could put you and the children in danger. You’ve got to let me deal with this alone. Stay away from it, Laura.”
She stared at him, her dark gaze brimming with frustration. “No way—”
He cut her off gently. “I have to know the children are safe. You have to take care of them for me—for us—while I put my past to rest.”
Ellie must’ve sensed her mother’s tension for the infant started to fuss. He was a cad to be so relieved at being saved by a baby’s distress. Ellie, uncharacteristically, wanted no part of being soothed. Her fussing escalated to crying outright and soon to screaming. Not appreciating mommy’s stress, apparently.
Laura spared him a look that promised this conversation was not over as she left to find Lisbet.
The phone rang again. He glanced at the caller ID and jolted. William Ward. How had his former attorney found this phone number, and furthermore, why on earth was he calling it? Nick picked up the receiver quickly lest Laura take the call.
“Good morning, William.”
“Nikolas. We need to talk.”
“Then speak.”
“This is confidential. Needs to be face-to-face.”
Nick sighed. “In case you haven’t seen the news this morning, I’m a little busy at the moment.” Not to mention he had serious damage control to do with Laura. He knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t about to let him deal with this mess on his own.
The lawyer huffed and then said heavily, “I’ve been doing some digging about you. I’ve found something. It’s bad.”
Nick froze. “What is it?”
“I’m at my beach house on the Cape. Get here as fast as you can.”
“I can’t just drop everything here and come see you!” Nick exploded. “The AbaCo trial is about to begin. And furthermore, my old life is over. Finished. I’m not that person anymore.”
“Based on what’s sitting on my desk in front of me, your old life is about to come after you whether you like it or not.”
“I won’t let my past touch my new life,” Nick bit out sharply. He turned to pace and stopped in his tracks. Laura. She was standing in the doorway, the color draining from her face as he watched.
“I’ve got to go,” Nick snapped.
William said forcefully, “I’m not kidding. You need to come up here—”
He hung up on the lawyer.
“What’s up?” Laura asked. Her cool voice sounded brittle, like she was barely hanging on to self-control.
“My past,” he bit out. “I don’t know.” He shoved a frustrated hand through his hair. “I don’t remember any of it.”
“You knew your real name. It would’ve taken you two minutes on the internet to find out all about yourself, and maybe even what’s got you all freaked out.”
How was he supposed to explain his dead certainty that he had to leave his past alone? To stay far, far away from anything having to do with Nikolas Spiros? It would sound like a lame excuse to her. Hell, maybe it was a lame excuse.
Laura’s voice fell, dropping into a hurt hush that was a hundred times more painful than if she’d yelled at him. “I thought you loved me.”
He didn’t try to stop her as she whirled and ran from the room. He’d been worse than a fool to avoid his past, and she was right to be furious with him. Every accusation she’d thrown at him was less awful than the ones he was flinging at himself right now. It didn’t even make things better that he was dying inside. She was everything to him, and he’d hurt her terribly. He’d rather endure torture than cause her an ounce of pain. But he’d pretty well blown that. He’d blown everything.
Now what was he supposed to do? How was he ever going to make this better?
Swearing long and hard at himself, he headed upstairs to Adam’s room. The child was still asleep, which was just as well. He didn’t think he’d have the strength to say goodbye to his son if Adam were awake. Stroking the dark, silky hair so like his own gently, he murmured, “I love you more than life. Never doubt that. Take care of your mother for me. And be brave.”
He turned and left quickly before he could weaken. He had to protect them all. No matter the cost to himself. Feeling every bit of the past six years in his bones, an ache that had never quite gone away, he headed downstairs. Laura and the kids had kept it at bay with their love and laughter, but all of a sudden, the withheld agony was back.
“Are you going out, Mr. Cass?” Marta asked in surprise. “Breakfast will be ready soon.”
He rasped, “I won’t be taking breakfast today. And you’d better send Laura’s up to her office. I suspect she’s going to be busy in there for a while.”
By noon, with her connections she’d probably know more about Nick Cass than he did. And she would definitely know everything there was to know about Nikolas Spiros. Every last ugly, selfish, tawdry detail.
He’d lost her. The lies had finally caught up with him. But, Lord, the cost of it. His eyes hot and his throat painfully tight, he stepped out of the house and drove away from the best things that had ever happened to him. He’d ruined it all. Everything that was good and right about his life retreated in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of the estate. If it was the last thing he ever did, he’d make this mess right. Put his family back together.
He thought he’d known hell before in a box. Hah! That had been a walk in a park compared to the hell embracing him now. A hell of his own making.
* * *
Laura was hanging on by a thread. The phone wouldn’t quit ringing, and she was developing a horrendous headache. How on earth had she never connected Nick to Nikolas Spiros? She should have recognized him in Paris, and sometime in the past year she definitely should have searched for disappearances of men matching Nick’s description six years ago. But no. He hadn’t wanted to know, and she’d gone along with his plan to bury their heads in the sand and avoid facing whatever demons lurked in his past. She’d willfully ignored the signs that Nick was not what he appeared to be, had been so caught up in her own selfish bliss that she hadn’t asked any of the obvious questions.
Why didn’t he have any other family or friends he wanted to let know he was alive and free? Why was he so at ease living in the luxurious world she inhabited? Why did he flatly refuse to talk about his past prior to his memory loss? And the granddaddy of them all—why was he kidnapped and thrown into a box for five years? Who were his enemies, and why did they bear him so much malice that they chose to make him suffer rather than simply kill him?
At lunchtime, Lisbet apologetically poked her head into Laura’s office. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but Adam is hysterical and really needs to be with you. I’ve tried everything I know to calm him, but he’s panicked that something bad has happened to you and his father. Nothing will do but for him to see you.”
Laura stood up quickly. The needs of her children would always come first over her work … even if that work was investigating their father. She hurried to the playroom, where Adam was curled up in a sobbing ball in the corner, hugging the stuffed elephant that had been his special toy forever.
Laura stroked his back gently. “Hey, kiddo. What’s the matter?”
The child flung himself at her, wrapping his arms around her neck and squeezing her tightly enough that it was a little hard to breathe. Not that she complained. She hugged his shaking body. “Everything’s okay,” she soothed him, rocking back and forth.
“Daddy’s gone, and the bad man got him!”
“Daddy’s not gone. And the bad man definitely didn’t get him,” Laura declared.
Lisbet cleared her throat. “Begging your pardon, but Mr. Cass left the house before breakfast.”
Laura’s entire being clenched in shock. He’d left? Where had he gone? And for how long? She shoved back her panic, focusing for the moment on her son. “Adam, Daddy has some business to take care of. It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not. He told me to take care of you for him. And to be brave. He wouldn’t say that if he was coming back. He went to fight the bad man.”
“Well, honey, even if he did, Daddy will win. It’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t!” Adam wailed.
“Do you need me to go help Daddy?”
Adam lifted his red, wet gaze to hers. “Can you do that?”
“Sure. I’m pretty ferocious, you know.”
“Daddy says you’re like a mama bear with cubs,” Adam replied dryly, his humor already so much like his father’s.
A burning knife twisted in her gut. She replied stoutly, “He’s right. Grrrr.”
Adam smiled reluctantly. But he wasn’t about to be diverted so easily. “You won’t let the bad man get you, too?”
“Never.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. Cross my heart, hope to die, alligator in my eye.”
“Alligator in your—” Adam giggled. “That’s silly.”
“Made you laugh, didn’t it?”
“Yes.” He waxed thoughtful once more. Impossible to distract, he was. Just like both of his parents on that score. “Where do you think the bad man is?”
“Hmm. I don’t know. But I’m really, really good at finding people. I found Daddy before, didn’t I? I’ll find the bad man, and I’ll find Daddy, again. I’d never let anything happen to anyone in our family. I’m a mama bear, and you and Ellie are my cubs. Don’t you ever forget that, okay?”
Adam nodded against her neck.
She closed her eyes and prayed for strength. She had to find Nick. Figure out what had gone so wrong so fast. And somehow, some way, put it right. Her children needed their father.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_27d82fb5-8b38-5c06-87dc-c166d91c270e)
Laura was startled when Marta announced that Tatum Carter was at the house and waiting in the library to speak with her. Since when did lawyers make house calls? He must be panicked over Nick’s abrupt disappearance yesterday. Join the club.
She left her computer, which had been giving up a treasure trove of information on one Nikolas Spiros, and walked down the hall to the library. “Tatum. This is a pleasant surprise. What can I do for you today?”
“Tell me where Nick is. The feds are going to have my head on a platter if I lose their star witness for them. The trial starts next week.”
She replied quietly, “If I knew where he was, do you think I’d be standing here talking to you?”
“What the hell’s going on with him, Laura?”
She sighed. “I think we all underestimated the trauma he’s suffering from. And I think we all ignored the possible problems his memory loss could be concealing.”
“What’s your gut feel about him? Is he stable enough to put on a witness stand? If AbaCo skates on this kidnapping charge, it’ll be like letting Al Capone get off on the tax evasion charges that finally landed him in jail where he belonged.”
She wasn’t concerned about Nick’s stability as much as she was about the state of his heart. Had he already abandoned her and the kids and returned to his old life? Goodness knew, Nikolas Spiros had lived a life of glamorous excess that went well beyond even her wealth to provide.
She spoke with a conviction she was far from feeling. “If Nick goes on the witness stand, he’ll do what he has to do to put away his captors.” Even if it messes up his personal life? Costs him the Spiros fortune? She’d like to think he was that honorable, but at this point, she had no way of knowing.
“Where is he, Laura? What’s your best guess?”
“My best guess—” her best hope “—is that he’s gone away to deal with the fallout of his past and that he’ll be back when it’s resolved.”
“How long is that going to take? He’s got about a week to get his ducks in line.”
She shrugged. If only Nick had confided in her. Had let her help him. She had enormous resources, official and unofficial, at her fingertips with which to help him. She understood his impulse to protect her and the kids, to keep his new life far away from his old one. But she was still as frustrated as all get out at her current helplessness. If only she knew where he was!
“Tatum, if you were a wealthy man who’s been out of touch with his life for a while, where would you go to pick up the threads?”
“Easy. My stock broker and my lawyer.”
She nodded. “How do I go about finding out who Nick’s—Nikolas’s—personal attorney was six years ago?”
Tatum frowned. “Client lists are confidential. But I could make a few phone calls. Maybe find out something off the record. Where was Nick living prior to his kidnapping?”
“His shipping empire was headquartered in Athens and had offices all around the world.” Including Paris. “His North American headquarters was in Boston.”
Tatum called an attorney buddy of his from law school who practiced in Boston. That guy didn’t know anything, but referred Tatum to someone else. As the lawyer placed a second call, she reflected on the enormous power of good-old-boy networks.
The second lawyer knew something. She could tell by the way Tatum’s face lit up as he listened intently.
“Ward, MacIntosh and Howe,” Tatum announced as he disconnected the call. “Want me to contact them and see if Nick’s been in their offices recently?”
“Sure.”
If Nick had been to visit his lawyer, he might still be in the Boston area. During his incarceration, his shipping company had been sold out from under him, and he might very well be trying to reverse that sale. If not that, Nick was probably getting funds released into his hands to finance whatever he planned to do next. She had an alert set on their joint bank accounts to notify her the second Nick accessed any of them, but so far, he hadn’t. He was welcome to whatever he needed or wanted from her accounts.
Funny how love and family made something like money seem so trivial. Not that she’d ever been that hung up on wealth. She just wanted to have enough to do what she wanted to without having to worry about it. Case in point: It had been handy over the past five years to finance her own investigations as she helped women find the fathers of their children. Most of her clients had been in desperate financial straits and couldn’t have paid her a dime even if they’d known who she was.
Tatum was on hold with Nick’s law firm and muttering to himself as he waited. “… fly up to Boston and try to contact him before the federal prosecutors get wind of the fact that he’s fled.”
“I don’t think he’s fled,” she responded. “I think he’s taking care of personal business.”
“Yeah, well, he’d better take care of it fast—” He broke off and spoke into the phone. “This is Tatum Carter of Carter and Associates in Fairfax, Virginia. I represent Nick Cass—Nikolas Spiros—in an upcoming trial against the people who allegedly kidnapped him. I need to speak with Nick’s attorney at your firm.”
Laura frowned as Carter visibly paled.
“I’m so sorry,” he stammered. “I’ll be in touch in a few days. Of course. My sympathies.”
Alarmed, Laura blurted the second he hung up, “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Nick’s lawyer is dead. Someone broke into the guy’s house last night. The police think William Ward startled the intruder and was murdered.”
Warning bells clanged wildly in Laura’s head. Home robbery, her foot. What were the odds that someone randomly broke into the lawyer’s house the day after his kidnapped billionaire client surfaced? Ohmigosh. Nick. How much danger was he in? Her gut yelled that he was the prime target on the hit list.
“I have to go, Carter. I’ll be in touch.” She raced out of the room and upstairs to pack. Somewhere in the next ten frantic minutes, she ordered up an emergency corporate jet to fly her to Boston ASAP.
Ellie squawked over the baby monitor, startling Laura out of her panicked packing. The baby. What was she going to do about her daughter? The infant nursed exclusively, and after her recent bout of jaundice, Laura was loathe to shift Ellie over to formula. She didn’t have enough pumped milk in the freezer to be gone for several days.
Laura closed her eyes in frustration. Mother or frantic lover? How was she supposed to choose between the two? With a sigh, she headed for the nursery to feed the baby. Afterward, she quickly packed a bag for Ellie as well.
She popped into the playroom to say goodbye to Adam. “Hey, kiddo.”
He flung himself at her and she laughed as he planted a sticky kiss on her cheek. “I’m off to go rescue Daddy. Call me whenever you want to, okay?”
Adam nodded against her neck. “Promise you’ll save Daddy from the bad man.”
“You’ve got it. I promise. Daddy and I will be home in no time. You and Lisbet have fun while I’m gone and don’t eat anything healthy, okay?”
Adam laughed. They both knew his health-freak nanny would never dream of letting Adam exist on junk food.
“I love you, Adam.”
“Love you, too, Mommy.”
Her heart ached at having to leave her precious son for even a few days. She nodded at Lisbet over Adam’s dark head, and the nanny smiled and nodded back. Lisbet knew full well how deeply Laura treasured her children and would take care of Adam like her own son in Laura’s absence.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. No more than, say, three days.”
“Yes, ma’am. Have a safe trip.”
Before she could dissolve into completely un-superhero-like tears in front of her son, Laura spun and left the playroom, giving a theatric leap as she passed through the doorway. “Super Mommy away!” she called out.
The last sound she heard as she scooped up Ellie and headed out was Adam shouting, “Go, Super Mommy!”
The drive to the airport and subsequent flight to Boston took several hours. It was late afternoon when Laura and Ellie arrived at Logan Airport. The baby traveled like a champ. She must take after her mother when it came to enjoying adventure and new experiences.
A newspaper purchased in the airport terminal told Laura that William Ward had been at his home on Cape Cod when he was killed. She plugged the town into her rental car’s GPS and in a few minutes was crawling down I-93 in the remnants of the day’s rush-hour traffic. Big Dig or no Big Dig, traffic in Boston was horrendous.
It was nearly 10:00 p.m. when she finally found Ward’s house just outside Hyannisport. In full spy mode, she turned off her headlights and drove past. It was impossible to miss with yellow crime scene tape stretched all around it. She turned down the first side road and parked parallel to Ward’s house. Time to go cross-country. Although how Super Mommy was supposed to pull that off with a baby in tow, she wasn’t sure.
She donned a baby backpack and settled Ellie into a nest of blankets within it. The baby had just dined and was ready for a nice warm nap. Thankfully, as Laura set out hiking toward the Ward house, the motion seemed to soothe her daughter.
Ward was not a criminal lawyer, which eliminated some disgruntled client or victim of one of his clients being the killer. It had to be Nick who triggered the attack. What information could Ward have on Nikolas Spiros that was worth killing for? Laura had no idea what it could be, but she’d bet Nick had a good idea what it was. Or if Nick didn’t know what it was, he’d darn well be dying of curiosity to know. And in either case, she figured Nick planned to find out what information Ward had been murdered over.
A clearing came into sight ahead. Assuming she hadn’t lost all of her CIA field skills, that would be the backyard of the Ward house. Hopefully, Nick would be paying this place a visit soon. And if she was lucky, she just might spot him and hook up with him. At least that was the plan. It was admittedly a sketchy plan, but better than having no plan at all. Given that Nick hadn’t used any of his credit cards and still had not withdrawn any funds from their checking accounts, she could only assume he was using cash and an assumed name. It was what she’d do in the same situation. And Nick was nothing if not highly intelligent.
She cursed under her breath as a branch whapped her in the face, showering her with wet, cold dew. She hadn’t snuck around in the woods for years, and she abruptly remembered why she’d never liked this sort of work. She’d always been more at ease in urban environments and had gravitated to assignments in major metropolitan areas. Like Paris.
Ellie made an unhappy noise as some of the cold dew sprinkled her. Laura reached awkwardly to pat her. “Hush, sweetie. Mommy’s trying to be sneaky.”
Although how on God’s green earth she was going to pull that off with an infant in tow, she had no idea. It was pure insanity to try it. But for now, Ellie was stuck in the woods playing spy with Mommy.
Laura pushed forward a few more yards and the baby bag caught on a bush. Of course, it spilled. Swearing under her breath, she crouched and picked up miscellaneous baby gear and stuffed it all back in the bag.
She rose to her feet and continued forward.
If William Ward’s killers had broken into his house to kill him instead of in a simple mugging or drive-by shooting, that meant his killers also had orders to search for something. Something in this house.
She stopped in the shadow of a huge tree as Ward’s “cottage” came into view. The house had to have at least five bedrooms, if not more. If that was a cottage, then it was a cottage on serious steroids. The sound and smell of the ocean were unmistakable as Laura reached the edge of the woods crowding the rear of the structure. No wonder the killers had gotten away last night. This forest made for a perfect escape route.
She hunkered down to wait for someone to show up and prayed it would be Nick and not the killers coming back to finish their search. Time passed, and Ellie snoozed happily at her back. The baby was like having her own personal heater snuggled up against her. Laura’s legs got stiff, and she moved through the trees until she could see the front of the house. The front porch was brick with tall white pillars and looked strangely out of place on the otherwise Craftsman-style home.
“How tacky,” she muttered to Ellie.
Ellie stirred long enough to burble her disapproval of the architectural faux pas as headlights came into view on the road in front of the house. Laura plastered herself against a tree trunk as a sedan pulled up in front of the house. A tall form unfolded from the driver’s seat and Laura gasped in spite of herself. He might be wearing a gray wig and be hunching over as if he were decades older, but there was no mistaking Nick.
His head came up sharply, almost as if he’d heard her. But surely that wasn’t possible over the roar of the ocean behind him. She didn’t put it past him to sense her presence, however. In her experience, people often became incredibly intuitive in high-threat situations. And there was no denying that the connection between them had always been electric.
She watched tensely as Nick approached the house. He had the good sense to walk around the house and approach it from the back, out of sight of the road. She drifted along beside him, maintaining her cover in the trees. How was he going to get in? As far as she knew, he had no particular skills in breaking and entering. She was startled when he merely stepped up to the alarm pad by the back door and entered a series of numbers. He reached for the back door and slipped inside.
Her spy within was indignant at how easily he’d gained entrance. She’d have been forced to go through a lengthy and difficult process to bypass the security system and pick the door lock. But the woman within who worried about Nick was incredibly relieved that he was safely inside.
She was just stepping clear of the woods when a quiet sound in the dark threw Laura onto full battle alert. It was a car. Coming down the road with its headlights off. Nobody with honest intentions drove around on a cloudy night on an isolated road like this with no lights. Crud. She had to let Nick know he was about to have company. She eyed the open expanse of lawn between her and the house warily.
If she was going to go, it had to be right now before the darkened car turned into the drive. She took off running as fast as she could. God bless her personal trainer for the misery he’d put her through this past month. She wasn’t in the best shape of her entire life, but at least she wasn’t a complete marshmallow.
She darted onto the back porch as Ellie roused, complaining about being jostled around so hard in the baby carrier.
“It’s okay, sweetie. Go back to sleep,” Laura soothed as she pushed open the already partially ajar door. She closed it behind her and somewhere nearby, the house’s security system beeped, reactivating.
She slipped into the deep shadows of a coat room and then into a kitchen. She had to hurry. The bad guys would be here in a minute or so. “Nick!” she called out. She moved into a long hallway that led toward the front of the house. “Nick!”
He emerged from what looked like an office, looking thunderstruck. “Laura? What are you doing here?”
“Later,” she bit out. “We’re about to have company. The kind with guns.”
Nick darted to a window to look outside. “I don’t see anyone.”
“They’ve pulled around back, then. Can we open the front door without setting off the alarm system?” she asked urgently.
“Who cares? Let’s set it off. The police will be here in a few minutes and it’ll chase off these bastards in the meantime.”
She nodded and they stepped forward. That was when he spotted Ellie.
“You brought the baby with you?” he exclaimed incredulously.
“I’m a nursing mother, and I wasn’t exactly expecting armed men to threaten us,” she snapped. “Let’s go. They’ll be inside any second.”
Nick nodded.
She nodded back and he opened the front door. A piercing alarm screeched deafeningly as they raced across the front porch. Ellie lurched against Laura’s back and immediately commenced screaming at the top of her lungs. It was that special, baby-in-mortal-danger wail that absolutely demanded an instant response, and it was all Laura could do to keep running across the front yard toward Nick’s car and not stop to comfort her.
A bang behind her and a simultaneous metallic ping in front of her did get an immediate reaction out of Laura, however. Someone was shooting at them! Ducking instinctively, she looked over her shoulder. A dark figure was coming around the corner of the house.
Out of her peripheral vision, she caught sight of a second figure coming around the other side of the house. Plus a third man entering the house … she swore mentally. She and Nick were outnumbered, which meant they were also outgunned.
The two men advanced cautiously, not shooting any more after that first volley of shots aimed at Nick’s car. Then it hit her. The shooters must have disabled the vehicle so she and Nick couldn’t escape. Which meant they wanted to capture Nick.
No! Not again! He couldn’t disappear again. This time it would undoubtedly be for good. They’d capture him over her dead body. Super Mommy roared to the fore, and Laura fumbled frantically in the baby bag banging around at her side as she ran after Nick.
“Your car’s dead,” she panted. “Mine’s that way.”
He veered in the direction she pointed and sprinted for the woods with her on his heels.
Her fingers frantically identified objects inside the baby bag. Bottle. Diaper ointment. Pacifier. Dammit, where was her gun? Finally, she felt its cold weight and yanked it clear of the fabric bag. She and Nick gained the edge of the woods and slowed down to navigate the heavy underbrush. Thankfully, Ellie had fallen mostly silent. Nick held back a jumble of vines for her and she slipped past him. She turned to face their pursuers. The pair of men were advancing slowly, now, weapons held out in front of them in grips that looked entirely too competent for Laura’s comfort.
“My car’s through the woods,” she whispered urgently. “That way.”
Nick whispered back, “You go first. I’ll go behind you. That way if they shoot at us they’ll hit me and not Ellie.”
“Take my pistol.”
He reached under his coat. “I have one. Keep yours.”
Where in the heck had he gotten a hold of a gun? Did he even know how to use the thing? She eyed him in dismay but was relieved to see him holding it in a reasonable grip. They might just get out of this alive, after all. If they could keep Ellie quiet so she wouldn’t give their position away.
Nick moved close as they crept forward cautiously. He crooned to Ellie, “Hush, sweetheart. Be an angel for Daddy.”
How he could be so cool with armed men chasing them, she had no idea. Shockingly, his calm tone seemed to mollify the baby and she quieted completely.
“That’s my brave girl,” Nick continued to murmur.
Laura looked back over her shoulder. The pair of men had been joined by a third and they were moving cautiously in this direction. She and Nick needed a diversion. Something dramatic. She dug around in the baby bag until she felt the steel cylinder of a silencer. She screwed it onto her weapon, assumed a shooter’s stance, took careful aim and fired at the gaudy chandelier on the front porch. It exploded spectacularly, glass shattering in all directions, and the three men ducked at the abrupt noise behind them.
Laura sprinted like a madwoman through the woods with Nick panting right on her heels as they dodged left and right around trees. Shots rang out behind them. Thankfully, in the real world, most people couldn’t hit the broad side of the barn when they were running themselves and aiming at another fast-moving target.
Bark flew nearby. Uh-oh. It didn’t look like their pursuers were shooting to take out tires anymore. That looked like a shot aimed to kill.
Waaaaaah! Ellie let out a renewed scream.
Laura fumbled through the contents of the bag desperately, as she ran, seeking the familiar shape of the pacifier. Ammo clip. Bottle. Diapers. No pacifier!
Bingo. A soft rubber nipple. Laura yanked it out as she ducked under a low branch. She stumbled as her foot slid off a half-rotted log buried in the leaves, staggered left and barely managed to right herself. But she’d dropped the all-important pacifier. She paused a precious second to look around. Thank God. White plastic caught her eye. Laura pounced on it and took off running once more.
The men behind them were close enough for her to hear their heavy breathing. At this range, they might actually hit a moving target. She put on a terrified burst of speed, zigzagging like a rabbit fleeing for its life.
Ellie’s screaming took on a rhythmic quality as the baby was jostled by Laura’s steps. No way were they going to escape their pursuers until the child quit giving away their position like this. They needed to turn this into a stealth exercise.
More gunshots rang out behind them. Nick swore behind Laura. “Hurry,” he grunted. “That was close.”
Desperate, she wiped the pacifier on her shirt and stabbed backward over her shoulder. She was so going to mommy hell already for putting her child in the line of fire, she supposed giving her a dirty pacifier wouldn’t make matters much worse. But what choice did she have? It was that or die.
Miraculously, she hit Ellie’s mouth, and even more miraculously, the infant took the pacifier, sucking it angrily. Laura slowed, ducking into an area of thick brush. Nick followed closely, helping her lift brambles aside as they crept forward. Male voices called back and forth behind them. Apparently, their pursuers had lost sight of them. Hallelujah.
She pointed off to their left in the direction she thought the car was, assuming she wasn’t completely disoriented out here in the pitch-black night and bewildering tangle of trees and undergrowth, and Nick veered that direction.
They burst out of the trees as a dirt road opened up before them. “This way,” she gasped. The car’s blessed bulk came into sight and she nearly sobbed in relief. Nick hung back a little, still protecting Ellie with his body as Laura used the last of her strength to tear toward the vehicle.
“I’ll drive,” Nick called out low behind her.
Like any good field operative, she’d left the doors unlocked and the key fob inside the vehicle. She dived for the passenger door and flung herself inside awkwardly, half-lying across the front seat so she wouldn’t crush Ellie, while Nick leaped into the driver’s seat and punched the ignition button. He wasted no time throwing the vehicle into gear and stomping on the gas. The car jumped forward.
Shots behind them announced that the bad guys had reached the road. The car squealed around a curve and the shooting behind them stopped.
“They’ll follow us,” Nick announced.
“Then drive like a bat out of hell,” she panted back.
While he commenced doing just that, she wriggled out of the backpack and half-climbed over the backseat to strap Ellie, red-faced and furious, into her car seat. Laura wiped the pacifier off as best she could, and offered it to the baby once more. Yup. Mommy hell for her. But sometimes a mommy had to do what a mommy had to do. And given that they were careening along a twisting dirt road at something like seventy miles per hour, she wasn’t about to unstrap the infant and try to nurse her.
Nick muttered, white knuckled, “Mother of God, Laura, what are you doing here with Ellie?”
“Saving your life, apparently. Where did you learn to drive like this?”
“I’m told I did some Formula One racing in my previous life.”
“Had a death wish, did you?”
“Something like that.”
“Have you got more ammunition?” he asked.
Right. Because every prepared mommy hauled around extra ammunition along with spare diapers and a change of clothes for baby. She dug into the bottom of the baby bag for spare clips. She came up with two full fourteen-shot clips and counted back fast to the firefight in her head. “I’ve got nine shots in my weapon now and twenty-eight more here.”
He nodded tersely. “I’ve got five shots left. I don’t have spare clips. It was all I could do to buy an unregistered gun without getting arrested, let alone acquiring extra clips for it.”
Ellie was finally subsiding. Laura smiled at the vigorous sucking noises coming from the car seat. It was good to know her daughter had spunk when provoked.
“Where does this road go?” Nick asked.
“I have no idea. There’s not a straight road on the entire Cape. My suggestion is we keep driving until we get to some road the GPS recognizes.”
He nodded tersely. “How did you find me?”
“Carter Tatum found out William Ward was your attorney. When we discovered he’d been killed, I figured it couldn’t be a coincidence. Clearly, he had something the people out to get you want. Which meant you were bound to come looking for it, too. So, I staked out Ward’s house and waited for you to show up.”
“You know me too well.”
She shrugged. “Lucky guess.”
Nick smiled wryly. “Luck had nothing to do with it. I always knew you were brilliant.”
“Are you going to let me use that brilliance to help you, now?”
He sighed. “I wanted to keep you out of this. I knew it could get dangerous, and I didn’t want you or the kids to get hurt.”
She winced at the faint note of reproach in his voice. He was right. She’d been an idiot to put Ellie in danger. But she’d only expected a nice, quiet stake-out. As soon as they were safe, she’d make other arrangements for the baby.
“I appreciate the sentiment, Nick, but it’s time to let me help you. I’m good at this sort of thing, and I want my children’s father alive.” She carefully avoided adding that she wanted her lover alive, too. She had no idea whether or not he planned to remain with her now that his true identity was out in the open.
The dirt road abruptly intersected a paved road. Nick turned west and in a moment the GPS popped up a road map. They followed the residential street for a mile or so and turned onto a larger road. As Nick accelerated into the desultory traffic, she watched carefully in the rearview mirror for any sign of followers. No lights or cars were hanging behind them acting like tails.
They’d made it.
Her hands started to shake, and then her whole body got into the act. Nick glanced over at her in concern. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“No, I’m not okay. Would you care to tell me why those men just tried to kidnap you again?”
Nick frowned. “It looked to me like they were trying to kill us.”
She shook her head in the negative. “They didn’t shoot at you when you were running across the lawn. They only fired at your car. They didn’t want you to leave, but they didn’t want you dead. In the woods, only a few of the shots came anywhere near us, and I think those were mistakes. They were trying to scare us into surrendering but definitely weren’t trying to kill you. Which means someone wants you alive. I can only infer that means someone wants something from you.”
Her declaration put a heavy frown on Nick’s handsome features.
She continued, “Why weren’t you killed six years ago? Why the elaborate kidnapping instead? I’ll bet that’s the same reason those men weren’t trying to kill you tonight.” Lord, it felt good to finally ask the question. “What’s going on, Nick?”
Chapter 7 (#ulink_b1bb7596-68d3-5ec5-a370-bd5f27018afb)
Nick sighed. Laura, of all people, deserved answers. Answers he was far from having, however. “I truly don’t remember anything of those five years. I swear,” he stated.
Laura nodded and crossed her arms expectantly, announcing silently that she wasn’t going to back off this time. Her child had just been put in mortal danger, and she was at the end of her prodigious patience. Not that he blamed her. He just hoped she’d forgive him when she heard the entire, sordid tale. Although, it wasn’t like he forgave himself.
He picked up the story reluctantly. “That trip I took a few days ago was to Boston to pay a visit to my old attorney, William Ward. It turned out he was able to fill in some pertinent details of the two years prior to my kidnapping.”
When Laura opened her mouth to ask about it, he raised a hand gently for her to let him continue. She nodded and subsided.
“I’ll fill you in on that in a minute. The morning after my face got splashed all over the news, William called me. He said he had important information to show me. He insisted I come up to his house on the Cape immediately.”
“What was it?” Laura blurted.
“I don’t know.”
Her hopeful expression fell.
“But when we get somewhere safe, I have a flash drive in my pocket that I took from the secret drawer in William’s desk. I’m hoping it’ll give us some answers.”
“How did you know about his house’s security code, not to mention this secret drawer?”
He made a face. “William was practically a second father to me. I spent a lot of time with him and his wife on the cape. He represented me when I turned eighteen and took over Spiros Shipping. He’s been my attorney ever since.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
“I have no idea.”
Laura mulled things over, and Nick let her. In his experience, she was eminently reasonable when left to her own devices to figure a thing out. He only prayed that reason led her to accept his words as truth.
They were off the Cape and approaching Boston proper before she finally asked soberly, “Why do you think someone killed your lawyer?”
“I can think of about a billion reasons,” he answered grimly.
She nodded in agreement. “I’ve been reading on the internet about the sale of Spiros Shipping after you dropped out of sight. I’m assuming someone faked your permission and sold it out from under you?”
“I don’t know if they coerced me into signing something or just forged my signature. I can’t imagine ever giving anyone permission to sell the family business.”
“Who hated you enough to steal your business?”
He briefly considered pulling off the road to address her question but decided she’d be less likely to attack him if he were at the wheel of a moving car with her and Ellie in it. He answered carefully, “When you arrived at William Ward’s house, I was browsing through the most recent documents on his computer.”
“And?” she prompted cautiously.
“And it turns out that shortly before I met you in Paris, I took a secret trip to Las Vegas.” Laura went still. She must see it coming. He continued grimly, “I wasn’t alone on that trip. It turns out I was secretly married there to a woman named Meredith Black.” The name felt strange on his tongue. Vaguely unpleasant, like the remembered taste of bitter medicine.
If Laura had been still before, she went statuelike now. Alarmed, he alternated between glancing over at her and keeping an eye on the highway.
Finally, he couldn’t stand the suspense of her complete nonreaction any longer. “Talk to me,” he urged.
“What do you want me to say?” Laura’s voice was hollow. Hoarse. Unlike how he’d ever heard it before. Guilt and self-loathing consumed him. He’d caused the woman he loved this pain.
He spoke in a rush. “I swear. I have no recollection of her whatsoever. I don’t know why I married her, and I surely don’t know why I got involved with you in Paris so soon afterward. I can only assume the marriage was an impulsive thing and didn’t work out. Maybe I was drunk and it was all a big joke.”
“A joke?” Laura choked out.
“A really, really bad one?” he offered. Based on the thunderous frown settling on her brow, Laura clearly failed to see the humor. He didn’t blame her.
He drove in silence while guilt and misery ate at his gut from the inside out. It was his worst nightmare come true. Something—someone—out of his past had the power to destroy everything he and Laura had built between them, including their happy little family. He’d contact this Meredith Black woman and get a divorce. The woman could have whatever financial resources had been left to Nikolas Spiros. He’d make it all better.
But then Laura asked, “Why hasn’t she come forward or contacted you now that your face is being splashed all over the news?”
“Maybe she hasn’t heard about me.”
Laura snorted. “You’re an international sensation. The playboy billionaire back from a mysterious, six-year absence. She’d have to be living in a cave not to have heard about you.”
He frowned. Laura was right. Why hadn’t this Meredith person contacted him? Or had she? Was she the urgent reason William Ward had insisted on him coming to the Cape to discuss?
“Did she have control of your financial assets while you were gone?” Laura asked.
“I don’t know. Possibly.”
“Then your return would throw a serious monkey wrench into her life. You’d be a massive problem for her.”
He laughed with scant humor. “Gee. Thanks.”
“Sorry. Just trying to think like my enemy.”
Warmth burst in his gut. If Laura considered Meredith her enemy, he almost felt sorry for the woman. But not quite.
Laura made an angry sound under her breath. He’d bet she wasn’t even aware of having made it. Her unconscious loyalty warmed him all the way down to his soul.
“You truly have no recollection of her whatsoever?”
“None.”
“Convenient,” Laura muttered.
Alarmed, he glanced over at her. “I’m telling you the truth. I have no idea why I married her.”
“She must be hell on wheels in the sack,” Laura commented sourly.
Nick laughed. “I’ll take you any day of the week and twice on Sunday over any other woman on the planet in that department.”
Laura threw him a vaguely skeptical look. “The thirty-year-old mother of two with a body under attack by gravity and who needs a slave driver of a personal trainer to keep her even remotely non-jiggly these days?”
“Yes. Exactly,” he replied firmly.
She didn’t look convinced.
He swore mentally. Just how much damage control did he have ahead of him to convince Laura that, in spite of this wife, she was the love of his life?
“Could your wife be behind tonight’s kidnapping attempt?”
The idea shocked him into silence.
Laura continued, “But why?”
“She wants to renew our vows?” he quipped.
“Not funny,” Laura retorted.
He sighed. “I imagine she wants to aggressively renegotiate control of my estate.”
“With a gun pointed at your head?”
“Precisely.”
“Bitch,” Laura breathed under her breath.
Nick laughed quietly. “My sentiments exactly.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Give her whatever she wants to divorce me.”
“She has probably taken almost everything you own already.”
He shrugged. “I’m not concerned about the money. I can always make more. I just want to get away with my life and my soul intact. I refuse to live always looking over my shoulder, worried that she might come after you and the kids someday.”
Laura’s expression snapped closed. Unreadable. Stubborn enough to give him a severe and unpleasant jolt. “Are we okay?” he blurted.
“No, Nick. We’re not okay. You’re married to another woman. You knew who you were and didn’t tell me. And now your past has put not only you, but me and Ellie, in danger.”
He nodded slowly. He couldn’t blame her for feeling any of that. But there was also no way he was giving up on them. He’d fight to the death to keep her and the kids.
They drove in heavy silence to his hotel and he led her up to his room. He’d just fished William’s flash drive out of his pocket to plug into his laptop when Laura’s cell phone rang. He frowned. It was nearly 2 a.m. Who’d call her at this time of night? Was it Adam, waking up from a nightmare and needing his mother’s voice to comfort him? Guilt at tearing Laura away from their son speared through him.
But then he heard a shrill female voice babbling through the line and Laura’s face drained of all color. Panic unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, including the moments after he first woke up in his box, ripped through him. Adam. Oh, God. What had happened to his son?
Laura was going to throw up. “What have you done?” she gasped in a horrible, unrecognizable voice at Nick. She shoved past him and ran for the toilet in the tiny connected bathroom.
“What happened? What’s going on?” Nick demanded right on her heels. “Whatever I’ve done, I’ll fix it. I swear.”
“They’ve kidnapped him,” she sobbed. “Adam and Lisbet are gone. Marta was drugged and just woke up. The police are at the house and the FBI’s been called.” Her stomach rebelled then, and she emptied what little she’d had for dinner into the toilet.
Ice-cold terror washed over Nick’s face. “Is there a ransom note?”
“No.” Laura splashed cold water on her face. It didn’t do a thing to drive back the nausea washing through her. She rinsed her mouth and headed into the bedroom.
“What else did Marta say?” Nick demanded.
“That’s it. Adam and his nanny are gone. There are signs of a struggle in the playroom. Lisbet must have put up a fight. The kidnappers have a six-hour head start and could be anywhere by now.”
She couldn’t stand still and moved around the room searching it frantically for she knew not what. Nick finally caught her in his arms and held her board-stiff body tightly against his until the worst of her panic passed.
“They’ve got my baby,” she wailed. “He must be so scared. If they hurt him—” she broke off on a sob “—oh, God.”
“I’ll kill Meredith if she’s behind this,” Nick gritted out.
Laura was swinging back and forth between terror and rage so fast she could hardly keep up with it. She gazed up at Nick with tears streaming down her cheeks. “What do we do?”
He gripped her shoulders tightly and stared into her stricken gaze, clearly willing her to hold it together. “We fight. We do whatever it takes to find him and get him back safe and sound.”
Under his hands, she squared her shoulders. “You’re right. Nobody’s messing with my baby and getting away with it.” Death dripped in her voice. Super Mommy had just gone over to the dark side. Whoever’d kidnapped Adam was going to pay in blood. She would find her son and get him back.
Perceptive as ever, Ellie started to fuss in the crib in the corner.
Nick suggested, “You take care of Ellie. I’ll make the arrangements to get back home.”
Laura nodded and stumbled to the crib the hotel had sent up while Nick called the airport and hired a private jet to take them back to Washington with all possible haste.
Nick joined her in the bedroom. “A plane will be ready in an hour. We’ve got about twenty minutes before we have to leave for the airport. The concierge will have a taxi waiting for us downstairs.”
Ellie’s tiny body snuggling tightly against hers calmed Laura enough that she could begin to think rationally. When the baby had fallen asleep in her arms, she said quietly, “I’m not entirely sure your wife is behind this. At least not directly.”
“Why’s that?” Nick asked in surprise over his shoulder as he threw his things into his suitcase.
“If she was involved in your original kidnapping, surely she was told when you were rescued. Which means she’s had a year to react to your escape. Why this, why now?”
“If she was involved with my kidnapping, then she’d have known I suffered a memory loss. If I didn’t come forward for a year, she might have figured I was never going to identify myself as Nikolas Spiros.”
“Either way,” Laura reasoned aloud, “she had no reason to believe you were ever coming back. Why would she have planned an elaborate kidnapping of your son? Because believe me—nobody got through my house’s security without some serious planning.”
Nick made a rueful face. “Maybe she found out I’d visited my old attorney and figured I was going to make a run at getting my company back.”
Laura thought aloud. “Okay. She had a motive to grab Adam. But still. Just a few days to hire a kidnapper, get him in place, find your son, figure out how to get past my estate’s formidable security, and execute a kidnapping? That’s just not plausible.”
“Who else could it be?”
She answered grimly, “It’s not like you and I don’t have other enemies. What about AbaCo? Could they be trying to blackmail you into not testifying against them?”
Fury glittered in Nick’s gaze. “They most certainly have experience with kidnapping and the personnel to pull one off on short notice. And they know you and the children are my life. But going after a child? Those bastards …” His voice trailed off as he choked on his fury.
She knew the feeling. “The trial starts next week. If they have Adam, we’re going to have to find him fast.”
“I know just the person to ask if AbaCo has Adam.”
“Who?”
“AbaCo’s CEO.”
“Werner Kloffman?” Laura echoed. “Where on earth would we find him? High-profile people like him tend to move around the globe and don’t exactly advertise their whereabouts.”
“What do you want to bet he’s in Washington pulling strings and trying to get the government to drop its case against his company?”
“Good point. If you’ll step aside and give me access to your laptop, MysteryMom needs to contact a few strategically placed people within the government.”
“MysteryMom?” Nick asked.
“That’s my email handle when I’m doing work for DaddyFinders, Inc. I built up a pretty decent informant network over my years of searching for you.”
He looked at her soberly. “I am eternally grateful you never gave up on me. You and I won’t give up on Adam, either. We’ll find him.”
A sob threatened to erupt from her chest, but she shoved it down. Her baby boy needed Super Mommy firing on all cylinders right now.
Nick must have sensed her momentary weakness because he said encouragingly, “Lisbet’s with him. She’ll protect him as fiercely as you would.”
She nodded gamely, refraining from suggesting that Lisbet might very well be dead and out of the picture by now. She knew all too well how important it was not to dwell on the negative, but instead to focus on hope and determination and keep moving forward.
Nick’s arms came around her. She clung to him tightly. Despite the unresolved problems between them, they were united in purpose when it came to retrieving their son. And that was all that mattered for now.
She disentangled herself from his arms and headed for Nick’s laptop computer.
Nick woke up as gray dawn crept around the jet’s window blinds, surprised that he’d managed to catch a nap. Fear for Adam slammed into him moments after his eyes blinked open, so heavy on his chest that he could hardly breathe. He tossed and turned in the uncomfortable airplane seat, tearing himself apart with guilt over having brought this danger to his son. Thankfully, Laura was asleep stretched out across several seats and Ellie was crashed in a playpen. He slipped out of his seat and tiptoed over to check on Ellie. The poor baby’d had a rough night last night and was sleeping deeply.
This aircraft was equipped with Wi-Fi, and he used it to connect his laptop to the internet and check the morning news. The gossip sites were having a field day over his return to the public eye. Even serious news outlets were commenting freely on the status of the Spiros fortune now that Nikolas Spiros was back. Analysts were speculating gleefully on whether he would attempt to seize control of his company from the German firm that had owned it for the past half-dozen years.
A limousine met them at the airport when they landed and whisked them south to Laura’s estate in Virginia. The mansion was crawling with police and FBI investigators who had frustratingly little information to share about Adam and Lisbet’s disappearance. The FBI kidnapping expert on scene seemed alarmed by the lack of a ransom note.
When Laura pushed the fellow to speculate on who’d taken her son, the FBI man hinted that perhaps whoever’d taken Adam didn’t feel a need to leave a note but felt the message was loud and clear enough without one.
Nick’s jaw tightened grimly. Which was a fancy way of the guy saying he thought AbaCo had Adam and that the kidnapper’s intent was clear—stop the child’s father from testifying against the company.
It didn’t help matters that, by midafternoon, the estate’s front gate was crowded with luridly curious reporters. The FBI had felt it would be best to go public with the story, plastering the news with pictures of Adam and putting the public on notice to look out for the little boy. It was a close call to say who hated the media attention more—him or Laura. Both of them were stretched to the breaking point by the lack of progress and the feeling of being trapped in their own home.
Finally, as they picked at the sandwiches a red-eyed Marta put in front of them, Laura’s laptop beeped to indicate an incoming message. She leaped from her seat to check it.
“It’s for MysteryMom,” she said tersely as she opened the message. Instinct had warned her not to reveal all her sources to the FBI team that had invaded their home. She’d kept her MysteryMom identity and email account to herself since the FBI was monitoring all her phones and other email accounts. Nick moved to her side quickly. The message, short and to the point, popped up. Kloffman is borrowing a home from friends at the following address. A posh street in the Washington, D.C. suburb, Old Town Alexandria, was named. The message was not signed. Not that he cared who had sent it, other than to want to thank the person someday … after Adam was safe.
Laura murmured under her breath, “We’ll have to sneak out past the FBI and the police.”
He nodded slightly. “I’ll engage them in conversation while you make arrangements for Ellie.”
He went downstairs and didn’t engage in conversation as much as he threw a tantrum, demanding that the law enforcement agencies do something. Personally, he understood that they had no leads to go on and their hands were tied until the kidnapper made the next move. But he kept that opinion to himself as he ranted and generally forced everyone’s attention onto him while Laura had a quiet word with Marta about watching Ellie for the night and milk in the freezer.
Laura slipped into the living room and made eye contact with him. He allowed her to talk him down off his fake ledge and the police were more than happy to let the two of them retire upstairs to the privacy of their suite.
“Are we good to go?” he asked Laura when the door shut behind her.
“Yes.”
He eyed the black turtleneck and slacks she’d laid out on the bed. “I gather you’re planning to break into the guy’s house?” he asked doubtfully.
“Do you have a better idea?” she demanded.
“Actually, yes.” He headed for her closet and pulled out an elegant linen sheath dress, silk stockings, fashionable stilettos, and an expensive pearl necklace. “Put these on. And do up your makeup and hair to the hilt.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Let’s knock on his front door. Or more precisely, you knock on the front door. He won’t think twice about opening the door for a woman who looks like you. Once he’s got the door open, I’ll join you. If we have to force our way in after that, so be it. But I bet he doesn’t put up a fight. He’s a businessman, not a thug.”
“You’re probably right. I’m not thinking all that clearly right now.” She glanced at him gratefully, and the spark of warmth in her eyes shot through him like a lightning bolt. Even in the midst of this crisis, she attracted him like no other woman.
She was authorized to be off her A-game. It was no surprise she’d fall back on her old CIA habits in a situation like this. But he knew life as a CEO. And if a beautiful, elegant woman showed up at his front door, he’d have let her in.
Laura dressed quickly and came back into the sitting room looking like a million bucks. Her flesh impact hit him like a physical blow. “You’re a hell of a woman,” he murmured.
“I’m a freaked-out mommy.”
“Stay strong, sweetheart. For Adam.”
She nodded and stepped close, leaning against him. They stood together quietly for a moment.
“Ready?” he murmured.
“Let’s do it.”
It was ridiculously easy to sneak out of their house. Laura knew every detail of the security system and made easy work of slipping past it. They pushed his BMW out of the garage in neutral and let it roll down the slight hill behind the house until it was out of sight of the mansion. Only then did Nick start the engine and guide the vehicle toward the back gate.
The trip to the Virginia suburbs of D.C. went quickly. Laura was grim and silent beside him. She definitely had her Super Mommy game face on.
The GPS efficiently led them to an elegantly restored row house in the heart of Old Town. Nick pulled into a driveway a few houses down and turned off the engine. He murmured, “You go first and I’ll lurk in the bushes until Kloffman has opened the door.”
Laura nodded coldly. Super Mommy was in full grizzly-bear mode. Satisfaction coursed through him. AbaCo’s senior leadership had coming whatever Laura could dish out and then some.
He followed her to the front porch and crouched beside the lush rhododendrons flanking the front steps. She rang the bell and stepped back so she’d be in plain sight through the door’s peephole.
The door opened.
Laura pitched her voice in a sexy contralto. “Mr. Kloffman? I work for the United States government. Do you have a few minutes to speak with me?”
“Of course. Please come in.”
Bingo. Show time.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_9cecfc60-aeef-57ae-a33e-539ab21c3ae1)
Laura was surprised at how easily it all came back to her—the technical skill, intense focus, the cold calm. Her mindset also included absolute willingness to do whatever violence was necessary to find and rescue her son.
As she passed through the front door, she placed her shoe strategically in front of the wood panel. Nick materialized behind her and had slipped inside before Kloffman was even aware of the man behind her.
“Who in the hell are you?” Kloffman growled as he caught sight of Nick.
“My name’s Nikolas Spiros, Herr Kloffman.”
The German spluttered, looking back and forth between the two of them. “You! I thought I recognized you. You’re that Delaney woman.”
“That’s correct,” Laura answered grimly. “We need to chat, sir.”
“How dare you? How did you find me? I want my lawyer.”
“This isn’t that kind of chat, Werner,” Nick said in an entirely too pleasant tone of voice. “Shall we step into the living room?”
The German must have sensed the threat underlying Nick’s words and moved without comment into an antique-filled parlor. A thrill coursed through her at the danger in Nick’s voice. She remembered sharply why she’d been attracted to him in the first place. It had been this sense of sexy risk that had clung to him.
Kloffman sank down in a wingback chair and stared defiantly at the two of them.
“So here’s the deal, Werner,” Laura said reasonably. “We’re going to ask you a series of questions. If you give us the right answers, we’ll leave and not bother you again. If you give us the wrong answers, you are going to have a very long night. We’d like to keep this civilized, but we are under no obligation to do so. Understood?”
Kloffman swore under his breath in German. “I know who you are. I’ll see you both in jail for this.”
Nick shrugged. “Panicked parents politely question the man most likely to have kidnapped their son, and you think any jury in the world is going to do more than slap our wrists?”
“I didn’t kidnap your son!”
“Of course you didn’t,” she replied smoothly. “The same way you didn’t kidnap Nick. Your flunkies did it for you. Plausible deniability is important for a man in your position, is it not?”
He shrugged, obviously aware that answering the question couldn’t help his cause.
“Surely you knew about Nick’s kidnapping and the kidnappings of dozens of other people who were held aboard your ships. It must have been a profitable little side business. What were you getting for your special guest service? A million dollars a year per prisoner? More?”
Nick stiffened beside her. His rage was palpable at being in the presence of the man who very likely was the kingpin behind his kidnapping.
“Care to comment on who paid to have Nick kidnapped?” she asked without warning.
Kloffman’s gaze darted back and forth between them. He definitely knew something he wasn’t sharing with them.
“His loving wife, perhaps?” Laura snapped.
“I have no idea.” Kloffman’s eyes slid down and to the left, a sure tell that he was lying.
Laura leaned in close. “Was it her? Yes or no.”
“No.” Another glance at the floor and a jump of the pulse pounding in his temple.
She looked up at Nick grimly. “At least that mystery’s solved. It was your bitch of a wife.” She looked back down at Kloffman. “Where’s our son?”
“Why would I kidnap some child?” Kloffman demanded angrily. “I’m not a monster.”
“Five years in a box on one of your ships says that’s not true,” Nick snarled.
Kloffman subsided, glaring belligerently.
Laura spoke grimly. “The fact remains that no one but you has both the means and the motive to kidnap our son and pressure Nick not to testify against your firm. AbaCo’s going down in flames next week and Nick is the spark that’s going to ignite the firestorm.”
Kloffman smiled coldly. “AbaCo is by no means going down in flames. Quite the contrary.”
A chill passed down her spine. The German was entirely too sure of himself for her comfort. He should be sweating bullets if he was involved in Adam’s kidnapping. But instead, he was sitting here as smug as could be, actually smirking at her.
She pulled out her pistol, and it had the desired effect on Kloffman. He paled. She spoke grimly. “Convince me why I should believe that you and AbaCo had nothing to do with our son’s disappearance.”
Kloffman’s lips pressed tightly shut and she leaned forward, caressing his cheek with the barrel of the weapon. Her voice was velvet. “You see, Herr Kloffman. I’m a mother. And if something bad happens to my baby boy, I’m not going to give a damn whether or not I live or die. It won’t matter to me one bit if I rot in jail for the rest of my life. So I have nothing to lose by putting a bullet through your knee—or through your head.”
Kloffman began to tremble and a fat bead of sweat ran down the side of his face. Now he was getting into the proper spirit of things.
“I swear. I had nothing to do with your son’s kidnapping.”
Nick replied tersely, “Convince us you and your goons didn’t do it.”
Kloffman stammered, “I’m sure nobody in the firm would do such a thing without my approval.”
Nick leaped all over that. “So you’re admitting that no major black ops happen at AbaCo without your knowledge?”
“Are you kidding?”
Kloffman looked like he’d blurted that out without thinking. He fell silent and a thoughtful look entered his eyes. She gave him as long as he wanted to work through whatever was on his mind. Nick also looked inclined to let the man stew in his thoughts for the time being.
Eventually, Kloffman said heavily, “Many things happen without my knowledge at AbaCo. I’m purely a figurehead around there.”
Laura stared. The statement had a definite ring of truth to it. The guy was a figurehead? “Who’s the real power at AbaCo, then?”
Kloffman glared at Nick. “As Ms. Delaney put it so succinctly, a cabal of criminals put in place by your bitch of a wife.”
“Can you prove that?” Laura demanded.
“Why should I?” Kloffman shot back.
She considered him carefully. “Because I’ll hold you responsible for kidnapping my son and kill you if you don’t?”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “Look. They pay me a small fortune to be the public face of AbaCo. But I’m not about to go down in flames, as you say, for all the activities they’re into.”
Nick leaped on that right away. “What else is AbaCo up to besides human trafficking?”
Kloffman snorted. “That’s the tip of the iceberg.”
Laura had no trouble believing that. “Again, I ask if you have any proof.”
“Why should I hand any of it over to you?”
Nick asked reasonably, “Who else would you give it to? If you were going to hand it over to the U.S. government, you’d have done it before now—when it became clear the feds are going to come after AbaCo with everything they’ve got in the upcoming trial. But you saw what Meredith’s goons did to me. I think you’re afraid to cross her. And rightly so, by the way.”
Nick was doing an excellent job of playing good cop. Which left her to play bad cop.
She leaned forward. “Don’t be stupid, Werner. I have the gun, and I won’t hesitate to use it.”
The German looked back and forth between them. “Let me make a phone call to inquire about your boy.”
She considered briefly. Why not? What could it hurt? She nodded and allowed the man to pull out a cell phone. He put it on speaker and laid it on the coffee table in front of him before hitting a speed dial number.
Nick commented as a man’s voice came on the line, “I speak fluent German.”
She threw him a grateful look. That could prove immensely helpful.
Kloffman nodded irritably at them. “Klaus. It’s Kloffman. Did you hear that Nick Cass’s boy was kidnapped?”
“It’s all over the news,” a heavily accented voice replied in English. “Serves the bastard right.”
Kloffman asked, “Do you know anything about it that could implicate AbaCo?”
“No.” The guy sounded genuinely surprised. “We had no such orders. Besides, everyone would suspect us right away. We’re not that stupid. Just do what you were sent to Washington to do and stay out of things that don’t concern you.”
Laura was surprised by the scorn in this Klaus guy’s voice. That didn’t sound anything at all like the respect due a genuine CEO. She glanced over at Nick and he was frowning, too. Apparently, Werner was telling the truth about being a figurehead.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Klaus.”
The German ended the call. “Satisfied?” Kloffman spit out.
She answered, “Not yet.”
“Look. I have children of my own. I would not hurt your son.” As her gaze hardened, he added in desperation, “Why would I kidnap your boy? The trial’s going to be stopped anyway.”
Laura started, and it was Nick who leaned forward and said smoothly, “Who did you cut the deal with, Werner?”
“The CIA.”
Laura was stunned. Her own agency had sold her out?
Thankfully, Nick didn’t miss a beat and nodded beside her. “Of course. I’ll bet you’ve held a few prisoners for the agency, maybe given them a heads-up where certain shipments were headed. You scratch their back, and now you’ve called in the favor and forced them to scratch yours.”
“Exactly,” Kloffman exclaimed, obviously relieved that Nick was on the same page. “In another day or two, the federal prosecutors will announce that national security could be compromised by proceeding with the case, and all charges will be quietly dropped. I have no need to kidnap your boy to silence you.”
Then why did Meredith and the shadow operators at AbaCo go after Adam? Petty revenge? The question still remained as to how they’d managed to move so fast against her heavily defended estate. It just didn’t add up in Laura’s gut. She was missing something major, here.
Nick, bless him, was carrying the conversation while her mind stayed frustratingly blank. He asked the German, “When will the announcement be made stopping the trial?”
“Two days from now.”
Laura’s heart sank. If AbaCo was behind his kidnapping, they had two days before Adam’s life became irrelevant to his kidnappers. How were they ever going to find him in so little time? Worse, if the trial was dead in the water, she and Nick had no leverage whatsoever to force this man to help them find Adam. Unless …
She leaned forward. “Werner, here’s the deal. Even if the trial is halted, Nick and I aren’t going to stop. We’re going to go public with everything we have on your company. We’ll use the media to full advantage, and with what we’ve got on AbaCo, we’ll destroy the company. In fact, we can probably do a more effective job of ruining it without the constraints of a trial to tie our hands. Do you believe me?”
Kloffman stared at her for several long seconds. Finally, he said heavily, “What’s it going to take to stop you from doing that?”
He might be a figurehead, but he undoubtedly liked his paycheck. He also seemed to understand that, as the figurehead, he’d be the sacrificial lamb.
Nick replied gently, “Save yourself, Werner. You don’t strike me as a bad type. Don’t let Meredith and her cronies drag you down with them.”
“How?” Werner snapped. “Who’ll believe me?”
“Why wouldn’t people believe you?” Nick asked. “I’m living proof that someone at AbaCo is up to no good. And there are others who have been victims of the company.”
Werner shook his head. “You don’t understand. It’s not about the prisoners they keep. It’s about the cargo.”
Nick glanced at her. Werner seemed inclined to talk to Nick, so she nodded subtly at him to take the lead. “What about the cargo?” Nick asked.
“AbaCo has become the freight carrier of choice for every nefarious group you can think of—drug lords, weapons dealers, terrorists, slavers, illegal lumber smugglers, you name it.”
Nick paled beside her. It had to be painful to hear that his family’s firm had fallen so far. “Do you have proof?” he asked hoarsely.
Kloffman hesitated one last time, and then he capitulated all in a rush. “I’ve been collecting it for years. Bit by bit. I had to be careful. But I’ve got cargo manifests, incriminating emails from customers, shipping documents, even financial records.”
“Why haven’t you taken it to the authorities before now?” Nick queried.
“What authorities?” Kloffman answered bitterly. “The same ones who are also using AbaCo to do their dirty work? How do you think the CIA gets weapons and supplies to the various regimes Uncle Sam can’t publicly support?”
The three of them fell silent.
Laura eventually broke the silence. “Who within the company does the dirty work?”
“The Special Cargo division,” Kloffman answered promptly.
That made sense. The people on trial for kidnapping Nick came out of that group. But the Feds had been combing through that division’s records for most of the past year and not found anything to indicate that AbaCo was engaging in widespread criminal activity.
“Do you have access to their real records, then?” Laura asked curiously.
Kloffman nodded eagerly. “I’ve been copying everything for the past three years.” He added sourly, “They didn’t even bother to restrict my access to the accounts. They think I’m too stupid to notice what they’re up to.”
Nick made a commiserating sound, and Werner shared an aggrieved look with him. Nick really was incredible at garnering empathy and trust from the German. He asked gently, “Do you have copies of these records with you? If you wouldn’t mind sharing them with us, I swear to you we’ll see they fall into the right hands.”
Kloffman reared back sharply. “No way. They’ll kill me.”
No need to ask who “they” was. Nick said soothingly, “Not if they don’t know who the source of the leak was. I give you my word of honor we won’t reveal where or who we got the information from.”
Kloffman didn’t look convinced. Laura spoke quietly. “Somebody has kidnapped our son. He’s six years old. And he’s going to die if we don’t find him. Soon. Please help us, Herr Kloffman. I promise we’ll help you.”
He nodded slowly. “I will give you everything I have. Maybe you can find something about your boy.”
Laura rose to her feet eagerly and Nick did the same.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t have the files with me. I keep them in a safe place.”
As would she in the same situation. So. It was going to require a leap of faith on their part, too. “Of course, Herr Kloffman. How soon can you get us a copy?”
“Twenty-four hours, maybe.”
A whole day? Her gut twisted in dismay. But it wasn’t like she had any choice in the matter. “Please hurry.” Desperation crept into her voice. “He’s so little….”
Kloffman squeezed her elbow reassuringly. “I shall do what I can to help, Fraulein.’’
She nodded, too choked up to say any more. Nick quietly traded contact information with the German and then guided her to the front door.
“A word of advice, Kloffman,” Nick commented as he reached for the doorknob. “Convince whoever’s actually running the show to sell off the pre-1970 ships before you have a major accident. Dump the Euro debt and invest in new, Norwegian-built, fast ships.”
Kloffman stared. “I beg your pardon?”
Nick shrugged. “Spiros Shipping has been in my family for three generations. And it’s being run into the ground. Stop thinking about short-term profit and look to the future before you destroy my company.”
The German stared, flummoxed. “Assuming I still have a job in a week, I’ll try.”
“Thank you for your help, Herr Kloffman,” Nick said soberly as he opened the front door. “We are in your debt.”
Out of reflex, Laura reached for the light switch and turned off the porch light as she stepped outside. The night was dark and cold, and she was more terrified than ever of the forces that had taken her son from her.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_5cb229a1-2392-5af9-9e42-78a95adba1eb)
Nick’s breathing still hadn’t returned to normal, and he’d been driving as fast as he dared back toward the estate for nearly a half hour. His company had become a major crime syndicate, compliments of a wife he didn’t remember? Why on God’s green earth had he ever married the woman? He supposed it didn’t matter, now. The deed was done, the damage cascading down on everyone he loved.
Laura burst out, “Do we dare trust him? With Adam’s life?”
“I think we should,” he answered.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “The time may come when we need Kloffman to hesitate before he calls his dogs down on us or Adam. I think we gave him good reason to hesitate.”
Laura sighed beside him. “You’re right, of course. I’m just not capable of thinking that clearly right now.”
He glanced over at her. “You’re not supposed to be thinking clearly. You’re a mother. You’re allowed to be panicked.”
“But Adam needs Super Mommy.” Laura’s voice cracked, sending a glass shard of pain through him. How was she ever going to move past the fact that he’d done this to their child? Even assuming Adam returned home safe and sound—and he refused to consider any other possibility—how were they going to move forward as a couple?
He asked slowly, “Do think you’ll ever forgive me for all of this?”
She stared across the dark interior of the car at him a long time before she answered. “I don’t know. After you lied to me in Paris and then spent the past year knowing you were living under an assumed identity and never told me, I don’t know how I’m going to trust you again.”
If only he could remember why he’d deceived her in Paris! For the first time, he regretted not really trying to work with the doctors who’d attempted to help him regain his memory.
“Now what?” Laura asked.
What, indeed? He was as stymied as she was and hated feeling this helpless. He’d felt this way in his box and had vowed never to be at anyone’s mercy again. No, this time it was his son’s life on the line. His control threatened to crack. Swearing silently, he fought off the urge. Laura needed him strong. Adam needed him strong.
“I don’t have a lot of contacts in the crime world,” Laura commented, “but I’ll put out some feelers. See if anyone’s heard anything.”
“I’d lay odds that whoever kidnapped me grabbed Adam, too,” Nick declared. “I’d love nothing better than to get my hands on that person and wring their neck.”
“You only want to wring their neck? I had something slower and more painful in mind,” Laura replied.
He shrugged. “I got you and the kids out of the deal. I learned things about myself in that box I’d have learned no other way. Things that have changed my life—changed me—dramatically for the better. Yes, the experience sucked. But, at some point, I have to get over it and get on with my life. I’m not kidding when I say that part of my past is over and gone. I don’t dwell on it.”
“I’m not so altruistic,” Laura muttered.
“You can sit around hating your life and bemoaning all your problems. Or you can accept that everyone has them and get on with dealing with yours in a positive frame of mind. I’m not saying life can’t be hard as hell. But it is possible to find joy in small things in the midst of all the bad stuff. I have my kidnapper to thank for making me understand this.”
“Will you be so philosophical if we find out he or she is behind Adam’s kidnapping?”
“I’ll kill him.” He added grimly, “And I’ll be entirely philosophical about it afterward.”
Laura smiled reluctantly and reached over to put a hand on his leg. He took a hand off the steering wheel and covered hers.
“We’ll find Adam,” Nick murmured. “Just keep the faith.” Why did it take something so awful to bring them together like this? How was he supposed to feel anything other than too guilty to breathe when he was finding Laura again in the midst of losing his son?
The house was in an uproar when they walked in. Marta had gone upstairs for Ellie’s 2 a.m. feeding and one of the FBI agents had discovered their disappearance.
The FBI agent-in-charge, a guy named Cal Blackledge, was not amused and chewed them up one side and down the other. Nick blandly explained that the two of them had needed to get away for a little while, to be alone and share their grief without an army of onlookers. Blackledge didn’t look convinced, but Nick and Laura stuck to their story, and there wasn’t much the FBI man could do about it.
As their chewing out was winding down, another FBI agent rushed into the kitchen. “You just got a message from who we believe to be the kidnapper.”
Laura’s coffee mug slipped out of her fingers and shattered into a hundred pieces all over the floor. Nick moved for the door nearly as quickly as she did, but Blackledge still got to Laura’s office first. When Nick stepped into the spacious room, a team of people was huddling in front of her computer. They moved aside, and Laura slipped into her desk chair. He watched eagerly as she clicked on the email message.
Your son and his nanny are safe. They will stay with me until you testify against AbaCo. When those bastards are put away for good, then you can have your son back. Do not fail, or else.
Laura looked up at him in shock, the thought plain on her face the same as the one he was having. The kidnapper was an enemy of AbaCo’s?
He asked, “What’s the kidnapper going to do when the government announces that it’s going to drop its charges?”
Laura paled and started to shake. He knew the feeling, dammit. They had two days until Adam’s life was forfeit. Two days to find and save their son.
Nick had faced some scary crises in his life, but nothing compared to this. His son’s life was in mortal danger. Seeing the threat on the computer screen before him made it real in a way it hadn’t been until now. Nausea ripped through him.
“There’s a video attachment,” one of the FBI agents announced.
Laura clicked on it. A picture of their son smiling up at the camera flashed onto the computer monitor. The video rolled and Adam placed a bright red leaf into what looked like some kind of scrapbook. “Look at my pretty leaf,” he announced in his clear, sweet voice.
Lisbet’s voice came from off camera. “Tell Mummy and Daddy we’re doing fine and that you’re safe and warm and well-fed. Tell them Joe has been très kind to us.”
Adam nodded. “I’m learning all kinds of neat things about nature. But I miss you. Joe says you’re fighting the bad man for him. Hurry up and win. I want to go home.”
A sob escaped Laura and she turned to Nick, burying her face against his side. He gripped her shoulder so tightly he was probably hurting her. But he couldn’t help himself.
The FBI agents went into high gear around them.
“Identify that leaf.”
“Nature. He’s being held in a rural area.”
“Joe. Get a list of disgruntled former AbaCo employees.”
“The child turned the page in that album. Can we digitally enhance the leaves on the second page?”
“Analyze the grain of the floorboards. They look old. Rough. Maybe in a cabin of some kind.”
The words flowed past Nick, but the only ones that stuck were the final ones in the note. Do not fail or else.
Or else.
Laura lifted her head. “Lisbet used the French word for very, très. She doesn’t speak much French. She was signaling us that the kidnapper is French or speaks French.”
Blackledge snapped, “Make that a list of French former AbaCo employees.”
A flurry of phone calls took place around them while Laura replayed the video over and over, presumably looking for more clues. Or maybe she just needed to see Adam’s face. It was both sweet relief and stabbing pain to see him. He might be safe for now, but that or else hung heavily over the little boy.
“AbaCo is refusing to release any employee lists to us without a subpoena.”
“Then get one,” Blackledge snapped.
“That’s going to be a problem,” someone replied. “They’ll have to release information about their American staff to us, but not their overseas employees.”
Blackledge frowned. “The French courts are notoriously slow, particularly when it comes to cooperating with Americans. We’re not exactly at the top of France’s list of allies these days. If AbaCo refuses to cooperate, it’s going to take too long to get what we need.”
Nick said sharply, “Spiros Shipping had a major office in Paris. AbaCo probably still uses it.”
“Do you think Kloffman—” Laura started.
Nick cut her off gently. “Why go to the top when you can go to the bottom?”
She frowned at him and he explained, “I ran Spiros Shipping for well over a decade. I’m betting Kloffman didn’t fire every one of my old employees when AbaCo took over. People who used to work for me must still be there.”
“What good does that do us?” she asked.
“My family believed strongly in knowing every employee and in building trust and loyalty among them. If I can find some of the old staff, they’ll help me.”
She pulled out her cell phone and slapped it into his hand.
“Let’s see if they bothered to change the phone numbers,” he muttered. He dialed the international number for Spiros Paris and was pleased when the call went through.
“AbaCo Shipping,” a female voice said in his ear.
“Marie? Marie Clothier? Is that you?”
She switched into English to match his. “Oui. Who may I ask, is this?”
“Nick—” Then he corrected, “Nikolas Spiros.”
The woman took off in a spate of excited French he only half caught. When she’d finally wound down, he said, “Look, Marie. I need your help. My son has been kidnapped and we’re trying to figure out who did it. I need a list of all the employees fired from the Paris office since AbaCo took over. Is there someone left from the old days who would do that for me? Quietly and quickly?”
“But of course. Let me connect you with François Guerrard.”
Nick laughed. “He’s still working? Why didn’t he retire years ago?”
“He would have if AbaCo hadn’t cut our pensions so badly.”
“Ahh, I’m sorry. I suppose it goes without saying that it would be best for you if you didn’t mention this little call to anyone at AbaCo?”
She laughed wryly. “That would be correct, sir. Ahh, it is so good to hear your voice again. I never believed what they said about you—”
He gently cut off what was likely to become a lengthy monologue from the talkative woman. “Thank you, Marie. I’m afraid I’m in a great hurry. We need to find my son.”
“Of course, Monsieur Nikolas. I shall pray for him.”
In a few minutes, a list of fired employees was sitting in his email inbox. Blackledge printed it out and his people went to work tracking down every single person on the list. Nick and Laura stayed out of the way and let the FBI invoke its formidable connections with Interpol to do the job.
The leaves were identified as belonging to plants indigenous to the mid-Atlantic states. Nick supposed knowing Adam was in one of a half-dozen states was better than nothing, but not much.
Laura spoke to Nick thoughtfully. “Why did Lisbet make a point of saying they were warm? It has been unseasonably warm all over the East Coast this past week. Is there somewhere substantially colder within this region that would prompt her comment?”
“Mountains or a coast,” Nick replied.
Laura turned to one of the FBI agents. “Would those leaves we saw be more likely to grow at high elevations or near the ocean?”
“The second leaf is a bush that tolerates salt spray well, ma’am.”
“The shore it is,” Laura announced.
Blackledge nodded his agreement. “You sure you don’t want back into this business, ma’am?”
She laughed without much humor. “Just get my son back so I can be a mommy.”
Nick put an arm around her shoulders and was gratified when she leaned against him. Within the hour, hundreds of law enforcement officials were combing the woods of coastal Virginia, searching for an isolated cabin. It was a needle-in-a-haystack hunt, but he appreciated the effort nonetheless.
A command center was set up in their living room to coordinate the various search teams, and he and Laura were only in the way. They eventually retreated to their suite to let Blackledge’s team do its job.
It was late afternoon when Nick’s phone dinged to indicate an incoming text message. He checked it quickly. “Kloffman. He wants to meet us in Washington tonight. Says he’ll have what we need then. Do you think Agent Blackledge will lynch us if we sneak out again?”
She answered gravely, “I do. I’d suggest we tell him what we’re up to this time.” Their gazes met in mutual understanding. This was one of those times when no words were necessary for them to communicate perfectly.
Nick nodded. His thoughts drifted to his wife, Meredith, and the roadblock she represented to his future with Laura. “You do know that the minute I’m clear of her, I’m going to ask you to marry me, right?”
“And you’re so sure I’ll say yes?” Laura replied tightly.
He stared, thunderstruck. “You wouldn’t marry me?”
“Nick, my son is gone. Everything I thought I knew about you turns out to be a lie. You have a wife. You cheated on her with me in Paris.”
“Everything I know of her says I barely knew her and she no doubt married me purely for my money. There’s no way it was a love match.”
“I don’t care how good or bad she was. You broke your marriage vows. I have a problem with that.”
“I don’t remember any of it,” he replied with barely restrained frustration. “I can’t imagine ever having married her. And even if I actually thought it was a good idea at some point, I’m not that man anymore.”
“It’s a lot for me to accept on faith.”
“Laura, I love you with all my heart. Adam will come home safe and sound. This crisis will pass, and I’ll still love you. I’ll love you till the end of time.”
“Is love enough?” she asked in anguish. “I’m not so sure.”
“Love is everything,” he replied with a desperate calm that belied the panic beneath.
Without replying, she turned and walked out of the room. His heart broke a little more. He had to find a way to put his family back together. There had to be a way.
How was it she could feel like she was drowning even though she wasn’t even in water? Laura’s world had come apart and she didn’t have any idea how to put it back together again. She’d have thought her stress would have gone down slightly after the note from the kidnapper. The FBI profilers were confident that Adam wasn’t in any immediate danger, and whoever had him was on their side in the fight against AbaCo. That had to count for something, right?
But instead, she could hardly function. Her thoughts were disjointed, she was unable to plan anything, and even the smallest of tasks overwhelmed her. Only Ellie kept her sane. The infant adhered to a steady schedule of eating, cuddling, and sleeping, and Laura was immensely grateful for the infant’s rhythms.
It took twice as long as usual, but eventually, Laura formed a plan of action. First on her agenda was to contact some people at the CIA and see if Kloffman’s claims were true. Had the agency cut a deal with him to block the AbaCo trial from going forward in the name of national security? If so, she planned to pull every string she had at her disposal to get the CIA to delay making the announcement for a few more days.
Laura slept restlessly in the recliner in Ellie’s room, waking up a little after dawn. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed a familiar phone number. The CIA operator forwarded her call to her old boss.
“Hi, Clifton, it’s Laura Delaney.”
“I wondered how long it was going to take you to call me.”
“So it’s true? There’s a deal to stop the AbaCo trial?”
“You know I’m not allowed to comment on such things, dear.”
“And you understand the life of an innocent child is on the line?”
He sighed. “I do. I was so sorry to hear about the kidnapping. Is there any ransom demand?”
She replied sharply, “Why, yes. There is. The kidnapper is insisting that Nick testify against AbaCo and bury them, or else.”
Heavy silence greeted that announcement. It was all the answer she needed from Clifton. The CIA had, indeed, cut a deal with AbaCo. “When is it going public?” she asked. “And don’t tell me that information is classified. We have to find Adam before the news is released.”
“Close of business today.”
It wasn’t enough time! “You have to delay it. We have to find my son first!”
“I understand, Laura. I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t make any promises.”
She hung up, staring in dismay at the happy clouds and dancing unicorns on Ellie’s pink walls. Adam was running out of time.
The FBI upped the man power over the course of the day, redoubling their efforts to locate Adam, but to no avail. Wherever the kidnapper was hiding him, he’d picked his spot well.
It was afternoon when another email came to her Laura Delaney address from the kidnapper. She raced downstairs and into the office to see it. Nick was already there, and he smiled encouragingly at her. Did that mean there was good news?
She sat down at her desk and read the note:
Thought you might like another video to know your son’s okay. I promise I won’t hurt him as long as you do the right thing and send AbaCo to hell where it belongs.
The attached video showed Adam playing some sort of pick-up-sticks game with Lisbet and squealing with laughter. For a kidnapping victim, he looked shockingly hale and hearty. The FBI team observing with her murmured in surprise.
“What?” she looked up at the faces around her in concern.
Blackledge shook his head. “This is the damnedest case. I’ve never seen a kid having the time of his life being kidnapped.”
“Stockholm syndrome?” another agent suggested.
Laura frowned. Stockholm syndrome was when kidnapping victims began to sympathize with their captors. It was an involuntary psychological reaction to the threat of dying.
Blackledge replied, “I don’t think so. The kid and nanny look like they’re genuinely having a ball.”
Laura asked, “Are they just making the best of a bad situation?”
One of the other analysts leaned forward, watching a playback of the tape. “They’re showing no stress-related body language. The muscles of the nanny’s face are relaxed and open, and see the way Adam’s lounging, here? He’s not taking any sort of self-protective posture. These two feel completely safe with their captor.”
Another agent piped up. “In both notes, the kidnapper has made a point of reassuring the parents that their son is safe and in no danger as long as things go his way. He used the phrase ‘I promise’ in the latest one, indicating he has a strong sense of honor and right and wrong. His word matters. As a profiler, I have to say I don’t think this guy has any intention of harming either of his victims. That’s not to say he won’t snap at some point and change his mind. After all, he’s enraged enough at AbaCo to have taken the drastic action of kidnapping someone. So, he does have a breaking point.”
Laura made a sound of distress. “And we’re going to see it when he finds out the trial’s not going to happen at all.”
The call from Laura’s CIA contact came in just a few minutes before five o’clock. The look of abject relief on her face said it all: they’d gotten their extension on the announcement that the AbaCo trial had been suspended.
She put down the phone and said, “He’s got a firm commitment to delay twenty-four hours and a tentative agreement to postpone the announcement for up to forty-eight hours beyond that. It was the best he could do.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing. He and Laura could breathe for another few hours. Her shoulders slumped in front of him and it was all he could do not to gather her up, carry her upstairs and make love to her. Anything to escape this endless nightmare for just a few minutes. But no way would she agree to such a thing. Regretfully, he turned his attention back to figuring out something, anything, to do to help find Adam.
He said thoughtfully, “You know, the kidnapper keeps emphasizing burying AbaCo, not necessarily the trial itself. You already said it to—” he broke off sharply. Mustn’t mention their extracurricular visit to Kloffman. He continued in chagrin, “You said it to me. What if, instead of testifying, I go on a media blitz to tell my story and slam AbaCo all over the airwaves? Done properly, I could probably tank the stock price and get the senior leadership fired. I could mire AbaCo in scandal so deep they’ll never recover.”
Laura turned around and looked up at him doubtfully. “If you do that, you’ll sacrifice a shot at a legitimate trial at some future date. You’d be giving away your chance to get justice for the crimes committed against you. Maybe you just launch a campaign to overturn the sale of Spiros Shipping and get it back.”
Nick shrugged. “If I get my son back, who cares about justice or shipping companies? Even if they skate on the kidnapping charges, you have to admit there’d be a certain justice in destroying the reputations of AbaCo’s senior leadership and wrecking the company.”
Laura winced. “How many people would you put out of work? Do you think you’re capable of destroying the business your great-grandfather built and your entire family poured its heart and soul into?”
Nick had to unclench his jaw to grind out, “How can you ask that of me? Do you really think I’m that shallow and materialistic? He’s my son. Nothing on earth is more important to me than him.”
Laura scowled back at him.
It was one thing to know they were both just lashing out in their stress and panic, but it was another thing entirely to stop the unreasoning fury bubbling up inside him, demanding that he yell at someone, anyone, in his agony. He knew Laura was feeling the exact same way. But it was still hard not to turn on her. They had to maintain a unified front. Work together. Adam’s life depended on it.
Blackledge broke the heavy tension between them. “May I remind you that a massive manhunt is in progress as we speak? Let’s not give up on the idea of finding and rescuing your son outright, shall we?”
Laura glanced over at Blackledge in chagrin. He was right. But it was so in her nature to have a plan B in case the main plan failed, and a plan C if plan B didn’t work out, that she couldn’t help coming up with contingencies for the crisis at hand.
The second video had put her mind a little more at ease. It was a good thing for a mother to know her child wasn’t scared or in pain. And thank goodness Lisbet was still alive and with him. She’d protect Adam with her own life, Laura had no doubt. But there was still the dilemma of how to proceed, given that they weren’t ultimately going to be able to meet the kidnapper’s demand in a court of law.
Nick’s thoughts must be running in the same vein, because he said soberly, “It would be a calculated risk to launch a media war against AbaCo. Maybe it would satisfy the kidnapper, maybe not. And if not, we’d have blown our shot at a trial that would satisfy the guy. What do you think about it, Laura?”
She looked up at him thoughtfully. “I think Agent Blackledge is right. Let’s allow the manhunt to play out while we see what our … friends … can come up with now that we’ve got a few more days to search for Adam.” She looked at him significantly. And in the meantime, they’d meet with Kloffman.
Nick nodded resolutely. “Done.”
She touched his hand lightly, silently thanking him.
He responded, “In the mean time, how do you feel about heading up to Washington for the night?”
She nodded and glanced over at the FBI agents within easy earshot. “You know me well. I’m starting to feel claustrophobic just sitting around here. I’d like to be close to Langley in case I have to twist some arms in person tomorrow. I’ll go pack a bag for Ellie.”
Nick nodded briskly. “I’ll call the hotel and have them arrange for a babysitter.”
Blackledge snorted. “Are you kidding? You’re bringing along an FBI agent to guard your baby.”
Laura glanced at Nick in chagrin. He said smoothly, “Excellent idea, Agent Blackledge. I’ll call the Imperial Hotel and get us all a suite.”
The FBI man nodded. “Morris, you’ve got kids, right?”
Agent Morris grinned. “Yes, sir. Five. I’m fully checked out on diapers.”
“Perfect,” Laura announced. “We’ll leave in an hour.”
Ms. I-can-handle-anything, I’m-totally-in-control vapor locked when it came time to choose a dress to wear to dinner. It was the darnedest thing. Laura stood in front of the hotel closet, staring at the dresses Marta had packed for her, mostly conservative business wear appropriate for a mother who was deeply concerned about her child’s safety. And for the life of her, she couldn’t choose one. It was as if her brain just shut down.
Nick stepped out of the bathroom, fresh from a shower, wearing dress slacks and no shirt, toweling his hair dry. He looked at her in concern from under his towel. “Everything okay?”
The man really was observant. “No,” she wailed. “I can’t decide what to wear.”
He moved swiftly to her and gathered her into his arms. Smart man. He knew something was seriously wrong if such a little decision was hanging her up. His body was warm and humid against hers and smelled of his expensive soap.
He murmured into her hair, “You’re doing great. I have no idea how you’re holding it together the way you are. Just a little while longer, and we’ll get him back. Courage, darling.”
“I think I’m all out of courage,” she whispered.
“Then borrow some of mine. Remember that Adam’s happy and safe and the kidnapper has promised not to hurt him. We’ll find a way to meet the kidnapper’s demands. And Werner Kloffman’s going to help us do that. He’ll give us his files, and we’ll be one step closer to getting our son back. But the first step is to pick out a dress and put it on.”
Wise advice. Just take this one moment at a time, one simple task at a time.
He turned with her still in his arms to face the closet. “I’ve always liked you in blue. How about this one?” He pointed at an elegant, navy-blue suit dress.
“It’s not very sexy,” she said in a small voice.
He laughed. “Sweetheart, you could wear a burlap sack and a paper bag over your head, and I’d still find you sexy.”
She sighed. “You do have a golden tongue. I don’t know if you mean a word you say, but you say all the right things.”
He kissed her forehead lightly. “I don’t say them to anyone but you, so I must mean them.”
She let him help her slip on the dress. He zipped it for her, and the perfectly tailored garment hugged her body with its slim lines. Nick left to finish dressing, and she pulled her hair back into a quick French twist. She added stockings and conservative high heels to the ensemble but stopped short of adding a pearl necklace to the outfit. She didn’t want to look like her grandmother, after all. She tugged the dress’s V-neck wider open and tightened her bra straps to increase the undergarment’s lift. There. Definitely non-granny cleavage.
She smiled at Ellie who was playing in the middle of the big bed. “Sweetie, you do wonders for Mommy’s assets.”
The baby burbled back. Verbal early, Ellie was. Must be a girl-baby thing. She scooped up the infant and inhaled deeply of her fresh baby scent. “Mommy’s going to go torture Daddy with this naughty dress for a few hours. It’s going to be loads of fun. Be good for the nice FBI agent, okay?” She blew a raspberry against her daughter’s tummy and laughed when Ellie squirmed and gave her a sweet, gum-filled smile.
Agent Morris poked his head through the open door. “Mr. Cass is ready whenever you are.”
She nodded at the man. “Ellie just ate. She should be good for at least four hours. There’s a bottle in the fridge just in case, and she should go down around 10:00 p.m. Order whatever you want from room service and watch whatever you want on TV.” She added dryly, “And no boys in the house, please.”
The agent grinned. “You forgot to ask me if I have a current CPR license and a babysitting certificate from an accredited after-school program.”
Laura laughed. “I’m not paying you that much.”
Morris looked around the plush suite. “Hey, this is the best babysitting gig I’ve ever landed. You and Mr. Cass have a nice evening. Ellie and me, we’ll get along just fine.” He patted the bulge on his right hip and added grimly, “Mr. Glock and I will see to it that nothing happens to your little princess on my watch.”
Laura nodded, abruptly serious. “Thank you.”
She stepped out into the living room and Nick made an appreciative sound. “You’re stunning, Super Mommy.”
She made a face. “I’m not feeling very super at the moment. I feel like I’m hanging on by my fingernails.”
“Well, you’re doing it with style. You look fabulous.”
She rolled her eyes. “We’ve been over this before. I’m the thirty-year-old mother of two.”
“That’s correct. You’re everything I’ve ever dreamed of and more.”
Her heart melted a little. It would be so easy to ignore his trespasses from the past. To fall into his beautiful blue gaze and forget everything else. Exactly the way she had for the past year.
Like it or not, she had to face up to the fact that their current predicament wasn’t entirely Nick’s fault. She’d been as guilty as he of ignoring the past and pretending that nothing bad could be lurking in that giant memory gap of his.
If she lost herself in him and his damnably magnetic charm again, she’d regret it as sure as she was standing here. Someday reality would rear its ugly head again, just like it had this time, and bite her. Who would get hurt the next time? Her? The kids? All of them?
It was time. She and Nick had to confront the past head-on and make peace with it once and for all. They had to do it for their children … no matter what the cost to the two of them.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_92c734bd-3aa5-54a0-b788-538e122a40f5)
The place Kloffman had picked for their meeting was dark and quiet. The booths had tall dividers separating them and plenty of privacy. Laura sighed beside Nick as they stepped inside.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured.
“Too easy a place to do surveillance. Not a good spot for a clandestine exchange.”
“Really?”
“Loud, rowdy, and crowded is a better venue. It’s impossible to eavesdrop more than a few feet away, there’s lots of noise pollution to foul up directional microphones, and people are hard to keep track of in a big crowd.”
It made sense. And she was the former spy, after all.
She continued, “Our best bet is to get in and get out of here, fast.”
“We’ll just order drinks, then. We’ll get what we came for and leave immediately,” he replied.
She nodded beside him and pasted on a pleasant smile as the maître d’ approached. They were led to a booth near the back of the place, and Kloffman was already there, looking impatient. Nick smiled to himself. Typical German. If the guy wasn’t five minutes early, he considered himself late.
Kloffman stood as they approached. Laura took his hands and greeted the German warmly. Quick on the uptake, Werner kissed her cheek and ushered them to the table like they were old friends. A waitress took their drink orders and left. Finally. They were alone.
Laura leaned forward and murmured past a warm smile that kept her lips from moving in any significant way, “Do you have the files?”
“Yes, my dear, I do.” He brought out a small box from under the table, gaily wrapped in hot-pink paper and tied with a wide white ribbon. A white bow nearly overwhelmed the fist-sized box.
“How delightful!” Laura exclaimed. “You shouldn’t have brought me a gift. Now I feel bad for not bringing you anything.”
Werner laughed back. “My wife insisted. She said you should open it when you get home.”
Laura duly tucked the box beside her on the banquette. She then led the conversation deftly into a discussion of how Werner’s grown children were doing, and what he’d thought of Southeast Asia, where he’d taken a recent vacation. Nick was impressed. How she knew that about the German executive, he hadn’t the slightest idea. Or maybe she’d just made it up and Werner was adept at following along with her patter.
Nick forced himself not to look around the place, not to check for listeners or watchers. He leaned back, looping an arm over the back of the banquette and smiling at Laura like a proud husband enjoying his attractive and effervescent wife. It wasn’t hard to act besotted with her. He was besotted with her.
In due course, he and Werner argued good-naturedly about who would pick up the tab for the drinks, and he ultimately let Werner pay the bill. With a promise to stay in touch and come visit Werner in Germany soon, Nick and Laura stood up to leave.
And just like that, the entire records of AbaCo’s Special Cargo division for the past several years were in their possession.
Nick hailed a cab and Laura climbed in as he held the door for her. He settled in the seat beside her. “Now what?”
“When we get back to the hotel, we open his gift and see what he gave us,” she answered lightly, glancing warningly at the back of the cabbie’s head.
He supposed she had a point. They couldn’t be too careful at this late date. He relaxed and watched the city lights pass by outside. Washington really was a lovely city, a gracefully aging lady.
Agent Morris was on his feet, gun in hand and leveled at their chests, when they walked through the door to their suite. Nick nodded his approval as the guy lowered his weapon.
“You two are back early. Everything okay?” the FBI man asked.
Laura shrugged. “I made it through cocktails, but I’m not comfortable being away from Ellie. I convinced Nick to bring me back here for a quiet dinner in our room.”
Morris nodded in sympathy. “How about I go take a nap with our little princess? Then I’ll be in good shape to stand watch through the night. And in the mean time, you two could probably use a little privacy.”
As the agent retreated, Nick called room service and ordered dinner.
He joined Laura at the desk in the corner of the living room as she booted up her laptop and plugged in the thumb drive she’d found inside the gift box. A long list of file names scrolled across her screen.
“How’s it look?” he asked.
“If the files contain what their titles suggest they will, we’ve got a whole lot of dirt on AbaCo we didn’t have an hour ago.”
“Anything jump out at you that might have something to do with Adam’s kidnapping?” he asked.
She typed quickly. “I’m going to do a sort for files created in the past year. The start date for the search will be the day you were released.”
She undoubtedly didn’t mean for that subtle note of blame to enter her voice, but it did. His gut twisted at the notion that his liberation was in some way the cause of Adam’s predicament. He had to make it up to the boy, and to Laura. Adam had to be okay.
As she continued to type in what looked like a long list of random words, he asked, “What are you doing now?”
“Setting up keywords for the computer to search for within the files. The guys at AbaCo aren’t likely to run around talking about kidnapping openly. They’ll use euphemisms like ‘picking up a package’ or ‘moving perishable goods.’”
Nick snorted. He’d felt like perishable goods plenty of times, sailing around in that damned shipping container. Laura threw him an apologetic glance.
“I’ve also set up a sorting algorithm to copy and organize all the content on this drive. It’ll take a few minutes to run.” She sighed heavily. “In the meantime, I think you and I need to go over the events from immediately before your kidnapping.”
He jolted in alarm. “But I don’t remember—”
“Yes, but I do. I thought I’d tell you everything I can remember and see if it jogs any memories for you or if you remember anything about some detail that might be important.”
Her suggestion made sense, but why did she sound so reluctant to revisit what had supposedly been a torrid and thrilling affair? “You’re making me nervous. What’s so terrible about our time together in Paris that you haven’t told me?”
“You truly don’t remember any of it?” she asked in a small voice.
“Nothing. I’m sorry.”
She waved off his apology and took a deep breath. “You saved my life the night we met.”
“What?” Shock poured through him. “How?”
“My CIA field partner and I were attacked and you came out of nowhere. You grabbed our elbows and told us to come with you or die. Kent shook off your hand and demanded to know who you were.”
Nick frowned. “I thought you types worked alone. You had a partner?”
Unaccountably, she blushed slightly. “Certain operations were best suited for couples.”
Ahh. Damn. But it wasn’t like he was in any position to cast the first stone at her. He had a wife floating around in his past. Of course an extraordinary woman like Laura had other men in her life. He asked as lightly as he could manage past his abruptly hoarse throat, “Were you two a couple?”
“Were. Past tense by then. The demands of keeping our roles as coworkers and lovers separate was too much strain on the relationship.”
“Why did I grab you two?”
Laura frowned. “It was late at night. It had been raining and the streets were mostly deserted. We were in the Quartier Latin—the Student Quarter. Lots of winding little streets and alleys. Several men had just come around a corner about a block ahead of us, and you materialized by my side. You must have come up from behind us. When Kent jumped away from you, you wrapped your arms around me and yanked me into an alley.”
“Why did you come with me when your partner didn’t?”
She smiled a little in recollection. “You were extremely handsome. Not many girls would mind having a man like you throw your arms around them and drag them off.”
Nick frowned, scouring his mind for the slightest recollection of what she was describing. He came up blank. Frustrated he asked, “Then what happened?”
“I heard a noise in the street. Then a scuffle. Kent shouted something. It sounded like the beginning of my name. Then it cut off. And then nothing more.”
“What did you and I do?”
“At the first sound of fighting, you pulled me down the alley. By the time Kent went quiet, you didn’t have to pull me anymore. You had a car not far away and we drove off into the night. The rest is, as they say, history.”
Misery filled her dark gaze and Nick moved quickly to embrace her. “Talk to me. What’s so upsetting to you?”
“I left him, Nick. I abandoned Kent. I should have stayed and fought. Maybe the two of us could’ve bested whoever jumped him.”
Oh, how well he knew the world of regret and self-recrimination. “Sweetheart, what’s done is done. It’s just as possible that the two of you would have lost that fight. Whatever fate met your partner could also have befallen you. There’s no way of knowing. I assume you did your best to find out what happened to him?”
“The CIA and I turned Paris on its head looking for him. But he was just … gone. Very much like how you disappeared. He’s never been seen or heard from since.”
Nick frowned. “Is there any chance he was kidnapped like I was?”
She shrugged. “I suppose. We know AbaCo held more prisoners over the years than the dozen or so they’ve released in the past twelve months. For all I know, there are more men and women just like you still floating around in international waters where law enforcement agencies can’t touch them.”
“Maybe we’ll find the rest of them in the files Kloffman gave us.”
“God, I hope so,” she muttered.
Turning his attention back to Paris, he asked, “Do you have any idea how I found you that first night or why I pulled you out of there?”
“You refused to answer any of my questions about it and just said you ‘had a feeling’ there might be trouble.”
He grinned ruefully. “I highly doubt I was psychic back then. I had to have known something.”
She sighed. “That’s what I thought. But every time I brought it up, we’d end up kissing and then … well, you know. My superiors thought we might be able to develop you into an asset once we learned more about you, so they told me not to press you too hard.”
It was his turn to sigh. “I do wish I could remember falling in love with you the first time. I’m immensely grateful I got to do it again.”
Her arms tightened around his waist. “I’m just grateful I found you. I swore I wouldn’t give up until I did.”
He murmured into her hair, “And it’s that same stubbornness that’s going to bring Adam home to us.”
“From your lips to God’s ears.”
He lifted her chin lightly, sealing her words with a kiss. He’d meant for it to be a simple gesture. Harmless. But instead, her arms wound around his neck, and with a sound of need in the back of her throat, she was suddenly all over him. And her desperation was all the excuse his needed to cut loose.
His arms came around her fiercely, lifting her off her feet and crushing her against him. They traded frantic kisses, tongues clashing as their hands ripped at their clothing. Never breaking the chain of heated kisses, they stumbled toward the master bedroom. He kicked the door shut with one foot as she dragged him by the open shirt toward the bed. They fell across the mattress, and his hands plunged into the deep V-neck of her dress, finding and seeking plump handfuls of female flesh. He shoved her clothing aside, his mouth fastening on one rosy peak. She arched up into him with a cry of need, filling his mouth with her bounty.
And then she was tearing at his remaining clothes, dragging his zipper down and freeing his rock-hard erection. He lifted his mouth away from her long enough to mutter, “How do you feel about three children?”
She laughed and fumbled in his back pants pocket, freeing his wallet, and fishing out the ubiquitous emergency condom inside.
He yanked her dress up and her panties down while she shoved his slacks aside and put on his protection. And then she grabbed his hips with eager hands, pulling him forward impatiently, her legs wrapping around him hungrily. He plunged into her heat, groaning at her tightness as she surged up around him.
It wasn’t pretty or elegant. It was a fast and furious tangle of clothes and limbs and heavy breathing as they raced pell-mell for escape from everything to do with their real lives. It felt so good to lose himself completely in her, to sink into the pleasure of her body, to turn himself over to pure sensation, to turn off his mind completely and think of nothing at all. Just the blinding ecstasy of nerves shouting for release and the ever-more-urgent collisions of flesh on flesh as they both strained toward oblivion.
The cries started in the back of her throat, small at first, then building in intensity as her climax neared. He kissed her deeply, sucking up her pleasure hungrily. Their tongues took on the rhythmic movement of their bodies and the slick slide nearly pushed him over the edge. Her body went taut beneath his, arching up hard into him. He tore his mouth away from hers to stare down at her, reveling in the way her eyes glazed over and her breath stopped as a shattering orgasm broke over her. Her shuddering groan was the final straw. He plunged deep one last time as his own body exploded.
It was almost as if he passed out for a second. Everything went dark and peaceful and quiet, and nothing existed but shivering pleasure tearing through his body in wave after wave of exquisite, almost painfully intense, sensation.
Time lurched into motion once more. Laura was panting and her hair was a disheveled and entirely sexy mess around her face. Perspiration coated his bare chest, and somehow his shirt had gotten tangled up around his shoulders. Laura’s dress was askew and her lips were pink and slightly swollen.
“We shouldn’t have,” she gasped.
“Why not?”
“Adam. Here we are having a good old time … wasting precious minutes we should be using to find him … so selfish …” She rolled away from him, yanking violently at her clothes, putting them back in place if not exactly to rights.
Who was she referring to when she spoke of selfishness? Him? Her? Both of them? “Sweetheart, a little emotional release isn’t a bad thing. We’re both stretched to the breaking point—”
She cut him off with a sharp gesture of denial.
If he knew one thing, it was how to survive. And that meant being supremely selfish sometimes. Grabbing happiness whenever and wherever he could find it, hoarding it to himself, and reliving it greedily. He tried again. “You’ll be no good to Adam if you don’t take care of yourself.”
“I’m fine. He needs me, and I let myself be distracted…. I can’t believe you went there with your son’s life on the line.”
“I’m sorry. But I think you’re underestimating how stressed out you were. Don’t you feel even a little bit better?”
“No. I feel guilty and self-indulgent. If something happens to Adam, it’ll be my fault.”
“Laura.” He took her by both shoulders and forced her to look up at him. “You did not kidnap him. You are not responsible for this. Don’t take guilt onto yourself that is not yours to carry.”
“Easy for you to say,” she snapped. “You conveniently forgot everything in your life you should feel guilty for. You’ve got a built-in free pass.”
He pulled back sharply. So. The truth finally came out. She did resent his memory loss, and she didn’t forgive him for it. He’d long suspected she harbored hidden anger about it, but she was such a damned good actress, she’d never really let on how she felt.
He understood her perspective. Really. But it wasn’t as if he could do anything about it. He was what he was, like it or leave it. And recent mind-blowing sex notwithstanding, apparently she’d rather leave it. Leave him.
He went cold from the inside out. It was as if he froze, every cell and fiber of his being crystallizing in an agonizingly slow spread of needle-sharp pain. The muscles of his face froze, and he couldn’t make a meaningful facial expression in that moment if his life depended on it. Only his thoughts continued to function, spinning fruitlessly round and round like a car doing donuts on sheet ice.
How were they supposed to proceed from here? Either she trusted him or she didn’t. Forgave him or she didn’t. Accepted him—all of him, his past and his problems included—or she didn’t.
The verdict was in. His attempt to make a life with her and the kids was an epic failure.
His survival instinct kicked in. Must keep busy. Give himself small jobs to do. Count the ribs in the walls of his box. Check his food and water supply. Exercise and stretch. Press his eyes close to the small hole in one wall of the box. Keep his retinas acclimated to light. Think about the business plan for the new company he was going to start when he got out of here. Just. Keep. Moving.
Mechanically, he mumbled, “I wonder if our dinner’s here yet.” Take care of basic body needs first. Food. Water.
“I’m taking a shower,” she announced, revulsion plain in her voice.
She wanted to scrub the feel of him off of her. The frost surrounding his heart hardened a little more, constricting painfully. He’d lost his son, and now her. The blow was almost more than he could bear. An urge to crumple to the floor, to curl up in a ball, to close his eyes and slip into the black abyss in his mind nearly overwhelmed him. He almost wished for his box. Things had been simple in there. Clear. Survive one day at a time. One sunrise to the next.
But this—this he wasn’t sure he could stand.
He stood in the middle of the bedroom and stared at nothing until he heard the shower water cut off. The sudden silence spurred him to motion and he stumbled out into the living room.
Laura emerged from the bedroom a while later. He had no idea how long it took her to dress. He pulled a chair out for her at the table their dinner had been laid upon. She sat down, silent, and he moved around to sit across from her. The rounded stainless dome over his plate had actually kept his fillet mignon lukewarm. The meat was tender and juicy. It probably tasted wonderful, but he couldn’t tell. It all tasted like sawdust.
Laura ate quickly and then moved over to her computer to start cruising through the AbaCo documents. The search for Adam was all they had left between them.
He had files of his own to search. The ones he’d lifted from William Ward’s desk after the attorney had been murdered. Maybe they’d have information in them that might lead to his son. Even the idea of such a project overwhelmed him right now. He needed to think more simply than that. Move to desk. Open laptop. Turn it on. Insert flash drive into USB port.
“What’s that?” Laura asked suspiciously.
“The thumb drive I found in my lawyer’s desk.”
Her brows shot up in surprise. “I assumed you’d already looked through that and hadn’t found anything worth mentioning.”
He sighed. “I was avoiding it, actually. I expect there’ll be information in here about my past, and I wasn’t ready to face it until now.”
The dishonesty of his words tore at his tongue as if it were being ripped off a frozen well handle. He still wasn’t ready to face his past. But it wasn’t like he had any choice. Adam’s life hung in the balance, and he’d walk through the fires of Hell for his son.
Laura’s gaze was dark and accusing.
The directory of files on William’s secret storage device scrolled down the screen in front of him. It looked like a list of client names. Most of this stuff was probably highly confidential. He glanced through the list. Smith. Spangler. Spiros.
There he was. He clicked on his name.
A sub folder opened up and a list of files unfolded before him. He browsed the titles curiously. They mostly looked like business contracts. But on the third page of file names, one in particular caught his eye. It was a report from the same private investigator who’d been looking into the Nick Cass identity and found nothing. It was dated the day William had called and insisted Nick come to the Cape—the same day William had died. Nick abruptly felt as if he’d just been kicked in the stomach. Hard. Taking a deep breath, he clicked on the report and started to read.
“What did you find?” Laura asked from across the desk. Sometimes the degree to which she was observant made living with her damned hard. Or more to the point, made living with secrets around her damned hard.
He answered heavily, “I think I just found my prenuptial agreement with Meredith.”
Chapter 11 (#ulink_9f8a9ad3-b026-52aa-a377-ec66b0ba2a0d)
What little breath Laura had left after the mood swings of the past two hours whooshed out of her. She felt like a washcloth that had been twisted and squeezed until every last drop of life had been wrung out of her. She was empty. Emotionally done in. Logic told her this was an extreme situation and not to make any major life decisions in the midst of the crisis. But the urge to sweep aside everything and everyone who stood between her and Adam was irresistible.
Nick began to read aloud. She exhaled carefully as he went through a ridiculously huge list of assets. Nikolas Spiros hadn’t been merely rich. He’d been wealthy beyond imagining. And she had a pretty big imagination.
“Listen to this,” he exclaimed. “If I die of unnatural causes, she gets nothing.”
“As in zero?”
“That’s correct. Not a dime. And in fact, she’s required to return any jewelry, clothing, cars, homes, or cash assets accrued during the marriage to my estate.”
“Wow. Trust her much, did you?”
“Apparently not.”
“Sounds like you thought she was a potential black widow even before you married her,” Laura responded.
Nick was frowning, too. “It does beg the question, why did I marry her in the first place if I thought it was a good possibility that she’d try to kill me for my money?”
“Were you always that mistrustful of the women you dated?”
“It was an issue wondering if women wanted me for myself or for my wealth. But at some point, you have to take a chance and go with your gut. I may have gotten it wrong with Meredith, but I got it right with you … twice.”
She brushed aside the overture. Adam was her entire focus at this juncture. But the mystery of Nick’s marriage to a woman he clearly thought dangerous tantalized her. Was Meredith behind either or both kidnappings after all?
The man she knew—both in Paris and now—simply wouldn’t have married a woman in whom he had so little faith. Surely Nick’s core personality hadn’t changed that much in the past six years. “Do you have any idea how you met Meredith?” she asked.
“No, I don’t.”
She asked cautiously, “Would you mind if I researched your wife a little?”
His gaze was open and honest, and he answered without hesitation. “Be my guest.”
Thank God. He was finally willing, not only to face his past, but to let her see it, too. She minimized the AbaCo files and pulled up her favorite search engine. She typed rapidly.
In seconds, pictures of Nick and Meredith from the front pages of the tabloids leaped onto her screen. “Attractive woman,” Laura commented.
Nick shrugged. “Beauty comes from inside a person. You’re attractive. From what I know of her, she has the heart of a snake. She may be well-groomed, but she is not attractive to me.”
Laura might have smiled under other circumstances. But as it was, she kept typing grimly. “She was living pretty high on the hog when you met—designer clothes, expensive hotels and spas, jewelry running into hundreds of thousands of dollars …” She typed some more. “Did you know she was collecting art? It looks like she’d bought a couple million dollars’ worth by the time you two hooked up.”
Nick looked about as interested as if she’d told him the price of tea in China had gone up by a penny a pound.
Laura poked around some more, but then leaned back, perplexed. “I can’t find the source of her money. She doesn’t come from a wealthy background, and I’m not finding any indication she had a high-paying job. She had a high school education from an average school. No college. She wasn’t a model. Several years prior to meeting you, she started tossing around the big bucks. She didn’t appear to be dating any men who could’ve financed that sort of lifestyle. According to her tabloid appearances, she seemed to be picking up mostly good-looking toy boys and footing the bill for them.”
Nick made a face. “Maybe she was a hooker.”
Laura snorted. “Even high-end working girls don’t pull down the kind of money she was spending. She was blowing through three to five million dollars a year.”
“Was she running up a massive debt? Maybe she married me to dig herself out?”
Laura gestured with her chin toward his laptop. “Is there any record of your attorney running a background check on her? My lawyer used to run one on all the guys I dated in college, and I didn’t inherit anywhere near the wealth you had.”
Nick scowled. “I seem to recall William checking out my girlfriends at university, and it drove me crazy.”
“Did you tell him to stop?”
He laughed. “I doubt William would have listened to me. He was the executor of my father’s estate and had the power to do pretty much whatever he pleased. As I recall, he didn’t think I was exactly the most responsible young man on the planet.”
“Was he right?”
“Absolutely. I was in my early twenties, good-looking, smart, and too rich for my own good. Girls flocked to me, and I had no problem taking advantage of that. William kept me on a stupidly tight financial leash. Good thing he did, too. I might have blown my inheritance before I grew up and got interested in the shipping business.”
“What else could Meredith have been up to that pulled in so much cash?” Laura asked thoughtfully.
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Cindy Dees
Carla Cassidy
Beth Cornelison
The Spy’s Secret FamilyWhen tycoon Nick Cass wakes up in a hospital room, he has no memory of the beautiful woman at his side. Yet when Laura Delaney tells him their son has been kidnapped, Nick has no choice but trust her – and rescue their chance at a future.Operation Baby Rescue Elise was devastated when the doctors told her that her newborn daughter had died shortly after birth. Finding comfort in a support group, she meets widower Jared… and their unanswered questions about their losses might just lead them to a new family…Cowboy’s Triplet TroubleAfter a reckless one-night stand Grace tracks down the father of her new triplets – and discovers that he has no intention of being a dad. But, when his brother, gorgeous rancher Jake Johnson, comes to her rescue, it seems Grace might have found her hero after all…
Baby Trouble
The Spy’s
Secret Family
Cindy Dees
Operation Baby
Rescue
Beth Cornelison
Cowboy’s
Triplet Trouble
Carla Cassidy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Cover (#uc715e101-6c95-5678-8bfa-0b589181a385)
Title Page (#u6d08bdcc-d115-561c-a84d-eb64ce1ea16c)
The Spy’s Secret Family (#ub48e6136-6cb1-5254-b947-aa976ee7652c)
About the Author (#u6056a668-67fe-5963-86c1-c72e885f4fb4)
Dedication (#u02546991-4c7d-5d9c-b7b1-b1a6e660f3a0)
Chapter 1 (#u38d12cd7-b42d-55a1-ab9d-5423d14e81e8)
Chapter 2 (#u50cb5203-b894-5dab-996c-40dcd0073ddb)
Chapter 3 (#u1df14617-556b-50f5-b0ca-5602337cd202)
Chapter 4 (#u940c86cf-a39a-5606-834e-62ae7613470f)
Chapter 5 (#u105e4845-d4dd-5f1c-a2ac-fb711c5034e1)
Chapter 6 (#udf8b14d5-4e48-5615-b19c-b5579d1ce71f)
Chapter 7 (#ufa1ebac1-c608-571e-8998-08488803c7cf)
Chapter 8 (#ub3def8fd-7953-5782-90a0-ada7095c1880)
Chapter 9 (#u0b7f30cb-7078-5052-93a7-51bf9043a46b)
Chapter 10 (#u05debb2f-8c86-52bd-bd3c-0fd964900107)
Chapter 11 (#ube7eacef-d914-5fea-8844-82d0d5508703)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Operation Baby Rescue (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Cowboy’s Triplet Trouble (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
The Spy’s Secret Family (#ulink_322cf232-8608-577c-a80a-7914b0adf536)
Cindy Dees
CINDY DEES started flying airplanes while sitting in her dad’s lap at the age of three and got a pilot’s license before she got a driver’s license. At age fifteen, she dropped out of high school and left the horse farm in Michigan where she grew up to attend the University of Michigan. After earning a degree in Russian and East European Studies, she joined the US Air Force and became the youngest female pilot in its history. She flew supersonic jets, VIP airlift and the C-5 Galaxy, the world’s largest airplane. During her military career, she traveled to forty countries on five continents, was detained by the KGB and East German secret police, got shot at, flew in the first Gulf War and amassed a lifetime’s worth of war stories. Her hobbies include medieval re-enacting, professional Middle Eastern dancing and Japanese gardening.
This RITA
Award-winning author’s first book was published in 2002 and since then she has published more than twenty-five bestselling and award-winning novels. She loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at www.cindydees.com (http://www.cindydees.com).
This book is for Shana Smith because it absolutely, positively couldn’t have happened without her. Truly.
You’re the best!
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b51ffa32-0d96-5230-90bb-ac1f3ad68a4c)
Why wasn’t he dead?
Nick stared up at the featureless white ceiling of his hospital room as the beeping of a heart monitor punctuated the panic flowing through his veins. Why hadn’t they killed him? Why five years of captivity instead—in a shipping container, on a cargo ship, floating around in international waters?
And why couldn’t he remember what came just before his kidnapping? The doctors told him he’d sustained a serious head injury at some point during his incarceration. Whether a captor had hit him during an interrogation or he’d fallen during one of the massive open-sea storms that had tossed him like a cork inside his steel prison, he had no recollection.
He coughed thickly. Supposedly, his pneumonia was mostly under control now. It had been touch and go there for a while. But the worry lurking in his nurses’ eyes had eased in the past day or so. He gathered he was out of the woods, which was good news.
They were still working on clearing his body of various other infections and trying to restore normal function to his digestive tract. The only way he was putting on weight was via the massive calorie infusions running through his IV.
They’d cut his dark hair and shaved off his matted beard, revealing the unnatural paleness of his usually olive complexion. The psychiatrists said he might never remember the lost time, a memory gap spanning approximately two years prior to his capture and the first three years or so of his imprisonment. Funny how the shrinks were trying so hard to retrieve those memories and he was trying equally hard not to retrieve them. Absolute certainty vibrated ominously in his gut, warning him that whatever lurked in that black hole of lost time was best left there.
Was whatever he’d forgotten the reason he was still alive? Had his captors been waiting for him to remember something? Or was there some other, more sinister reason that someone had been hell-bent on imprisoning him?
Maybe he was just being paranoid. Although it wasn’t paranoia if someone was really after him. Even now, he expected his keepers to burst into his hospital room and haul him back to his box. The idea actually made a certain sick sense. If his captors had orders to keep him alive and he’d gotten too sick to treat on the ship, they could’ve cooked up this whole rescue ruse to fatten him up and get him healthy enough to toss back in Hell.
Laura Delaney—the woman who’d rescued him from his metal prison and one of the only faces he remembered from the lost years—claimed the two of them had been lovers before he’d disappeared. She’d introduced him to a little boy who looked so much like him it was hard to discount her story that he was the child’s father. He desperately hoped it was true.
She was an extremely attractive woman. It wasn’t difficult to imagine dating someone like her. But was she for real? Or was she part of his captors’ evil head games? Was she here to trick him into revealing whatever secrets his subconscious was guarding so fiercely?
If only there was someone he could trust, really trust, to tell him what was real and what was not.
And then there was the troubling fact that he knew for certain his name wasn’t Nick Cass. Nor had he grown up entirely in Rhode Island. But Laura apparently believed both to be true. He must’ve told the lies himself. But why? If he and Laura were lovers like she claimed, why hadn’t he told her his real name or the most basic facts about his past? Why the deception?
Everywhere he turned, there were only questions and more questions. Frustration sang through his blood as sharply as his secret hope that his freedom, at least, was real. But he dared not share that hope with anyone. Not until he knew if anyone at all was telling him the truth.
Laura paused outside the hospital room, steeling herself not to react to Nick’s emaciated state. It wasn’t his fault he looked fresh out of a Nazi concentration camp, and he didn’t deserve to see her cringe at the sight of his skeletal frame, hollow face or his shadowed blue eyes. God, his eyes. The haunted look in them was terrifying. Would he carry it with him forever?
The shrinks doubted he would recover the years stripped from his memory. But they felt he should recover enough to be a functional member of society once more with time and counseling. He should recover. Not he would.
At this point, she didn’t care if his memory ever came back. She just wanted him back. The man who’d swept her off her feet in a whirlwind romance in Paris. The man who’d captured her heart and taught her what true love could be. If even part of that amazing man came back to her, it would be better than the hollow shell of a man on the other side of the door. She vowed to be grateful for whatever piece of him survived his ordeal. It was surely better than having no part of him at all. The past five years of waiting and wondering had been pure hell.
She knew he wasn’t convinced yet that his rescue was real in spite of that first night of freedom they’d shared. They’d gone to her estate, where he’d bathed and eaten. Then she’d made love to him with all the pent-up passion and relief in her soul.
They’d both cried that night. She’d interpreted his tears as a cathartic release, but she’d been wrong. The shrinks told her he believed that night to have been some sort of elaborate torture by his captors to taunt him with what freedom would be like. Apparently, he’d been crying because the idea of going back into his box after what the two of them had shared had finally broken him. She’d broken him.
The man hadn’t even known who she was, and she’d been so caught up in her euphoria at finding him that she’d never slowed down enough to realize how lost he’d been. Guilt at her thoughtlessness rolled through her. She’d always been a take-charge, full-speed-ahead kind of person. But that tendency had hurt the man she loved. Part of his paranoid state now was her fault. When would she learn to rein herself in? Had her impulsiveness cost her his trust forever?
She took a deep breath and pushed open the door. “Hey, handsome. How are you feeling today?”
“You’re back.” The abject relief in his voice broke her heart a little. What he clearly meant was, “So I get to live another day in this beautiful illusion? Thank God.”
“The doctors say you can go home soon. You’ll still need around-the-clock medical care, but I can hire nurses to look after you.”
Terror flashed in his eyes at the mention of leaving the hospital.
She pretended not to see it and asked lightly, “Do you think when you actually come home to live with me and Adam you’ll believe all of this is real? That you’re free and you have a family?”
He answered slowly, “I don’t know. I hope so.”
Hey, progress! He’d spoken of his feelings. Maybe he’d finally accepted that he was not living in a dream or a terrible trick. She picked up his bony hand and cradled it in hers. It had been so strong once, so capable of giving her pleasure, so confident in its gestures. She murmured, “I love you, Nick. If you believe nothing else, please believe that.”
“Even if you’re lying, the notion makes me happy.”
She smiled down at him. “Give it some time. Give me some time to prove this is real.”
He shrugged. “It isn’t like I have any choice. I’m along for the ride, here. So far, it’s a great dream.”
She smiled bravely while the knife twisted in her gut. “You’ll be on your feet and kicking up your heels in no time. You’ll be able to do whatever you want.”
And please God, let that include staying with her and Adam. Their son desperately needed a father, and she desperately needed the man she loved. Yes, she hadn’t seen him in five years. And yes, he might be an entirely different person than the one she fell in love with way back then. But surely, at least part of the intelligent, passionate, confident man who’d swept her off her feet was still in there, somewhere.
“How can you possibly be real?” he asked reflectively. “You’re too perfect.”
She laughed lightly, praying her panic at his declaration wasn’t audible. “I’m far from perfect. Trust me.”
“Trust. That is the thing, isn’t it? Who will trust whom first in this little chess game?”
“This isn’t a game, Nick. You’re free, you’re going home soon and I love you. That’s the God’s honest truth.”
He made a noncommittal sound, and his cobalt gaze slid away from hers.
He really did have to give his captors credit for playing out this farce to the hilt. Six weeks since his “rescue” and still no hint of tossing him back in his box. He gazed around the plush bedroom suite, decorated in dark woods and deep, comforting colors. It was a far cry from his former prison. Hard to believe he actually caught himself missing the container’s bare metal walls now and then. After a while, its confines had felt safe. Comforting. A steel embrace that kept out worse horrors.
He supposed if he had to trade one cage for another, this one wasn’t bad. It was warmer and softer, and definitely had better food. The hallway door opened and Laura slipped into the room, wearing a slim wool skirt and a silk blouse that clung to her elegant curves in all the right places. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes bright. He added better-looking captors to his list.
In all fairness to her, she’d been nothing but kind and loving to him since she’d opened his box and let him out. She really was a delightful woman, witty and warm, with a quick smile that made her impossible to resist. And she was a devoted mother.
She moved to his side, and he closed his laptop. Yet again, his unreasoning fear at what lurked in his past had prevented him from typing in his real name to an internet search engine. Just a few simple keystrokes, and he’d finally know what monsters lurked in the recesses of his mind. But his terror was just too great. He’d sat there for an hour with the damned computer in his lap and never managed to type a single letter.
Leaning over the chair, Laura kissed him warmly. He didn’t find it hard to believe that he’d loved her once. The only thing keeping him from giving in to serious attraction to the woman was the prospect of losing her. He figured as soon as he fell for her, that would be when the rug got yanked out from under him.
“How’re you feeling today?” she asked eagerly, almost impatiently.
“Fine. You look about ready to burst. Do you have a surprise for me?” His gut clenched. He hated surprises. He was still waiting for the big, nasty one where his captors swept him out of this paradise and whisked him back to Hell Central.
“I do have a surprise for you, Nick. A good one, I hope. Are you strong enough for a bit of a shock?”
Every cell in his being froze. This was it. Sick heat and then icy cold washed through him, leaving him so nauseous he could hardly breathe. His heart pounded and his breathing accelerated so hard that, in seconds, he was light-headed.
His gaze darted about, seeking escape. Seeking a weapon. Anything to defend himself from the attack to come. His gaze lighted on the window. He could make a dash for it. Fling himself through the glass. It was three stories to the ground. If he went head first, the fall ought to kill him. If nothing else, maybe he’d be hurt so bad they couldn’t throw him back in his box. Maybe they’d have to hospitalize him for a few more months.
“I’m pregnant, Nick. We’re going to have a baby.”
His mind went blank. Ever so slowly, his brain managed to form a thought. Not a particularly coherent one, but a thought. What new game was this?
“Did you hear me?” Laura asked excitedly. “You’re going to be a father again.”
His brain simply refused to absorb the information. He couldn’t find a context to put the words in. Couldn’t comprehend the purpose of this new torture.
Laura was laughing. “… too fertile for our own good … first time we made love we got Adam, and now, after that first night you were free, we’re going to have another baby … should really be more careful about birth control in the future …”
She was making words and sentences and probably was even stringing them together in some sort of logical order. But he didn’t understand a thing she was saying.
He did understand, though, that the hallway door was not bursting open. No thugs had come for him yet. The next few minutes passed with him murmuring inane nothings at proper intervals in response to Laura’s babbling joy. And still no one had come.
Could it be? Was this real? Was Laura really pregnant and expecting his child?
Something cracked in his chest. It hurt, but it was a good kind of pain. Was he truly free? Was a life, a future with Laura and his children a possibility? Did he dare hope?
Hope. Now there was a concept.
A baby, huh? His and Laura’s. A little brother or sister for Adam. How he’d love to experience all of it—the morning sickness and messy delivery and midnight feedings. Another child to crawl inside his heart and hold it in his or her tiny, precious hands. Lord knew, Adam had already completely wrapped him around his little finger in the short time he’d spent with the boy. Nick said a fervent prayer every night that, even if all the rest of this was a horrible, cruel lie, God would please let Adam be real. He loved the little boy with all his heart.
And now there might be another child for him to love?
Something exploded in his gut with all the bright fury of a fireworks display, burning away everything that had gone before, cauterizing old wounds, and leaving him empty. New. Reborn.
And then he gave that something a name. Joy.
He was free. Really, truly free. The nightmare was over. He surged up out of the chair and wrapped Laura in a crushing embrace. And then, for the first time, he cried for the right reasons.
Laura didn’t know what clicked for Nick, but after she told him she was pregnant, he changed. He took new interest in food and exercise and spending time with Adam and generally engaged in life more. He got stronger, and gradually, as her belly grew, the haunted look faded from his eyes. He quit eyeing closed doors suspiciously, and the nightmares seemed to fade.
For a while there, she’d wondered if he was too far gone, if she’d be able to pull him out of the emotional abyss into which he’d fallen. But this baby seemed to have done the trick. She rubbed her rounded tummy affectionately. Things were working out better than she could ever have dreamed. Life was darned near perfect.
Nick stared at the laptop on his desk for the hundredth time. He’d been avoiding the thing for months, ever since Laura had told him she was pregnant, afraid to rock the boat of this new life. Everything was so good for him—for all of them—that he had no desire to do anything to threaten the perfection of it all.
But his curiosity had been building. Maybe it was a sign of his recovery that he was starting to feel the tug of waiting answers. What had happened during those lost years? Why the lies about his identity? Who’d had him kidnapped and thrown into a box? And why hadn’t that person or persons just killed him outright?
Certainty that he did not want to know the answers, no matter how tantalizing they might be, still raged in his gut. Whatever his former life had been, he had no pressing need to resume it. Laura was wealthy enough for them and their children to live in the lap of luxury for several lifetimes. Whoever else he’d left behind in his old life had no doubt made peace long ago with his disappearance and gotten on with their own lives. His return now could only cause disruption and chaos.
But what if his old life, his old identity, came looking for him?
Nah. Surely that had been the whole point of his kidnapping. To turn him into a ghost. Make him disappear for good. As long as he stayed a ghost, made no effort to resume his former life, there was no reason for his past to come looking for him. Right?
The key was to keep a low profile. He closed the laptop with a solid thunk. Nope. Curiosity or no curiosity, he was not going anywhere near his old life.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_761ee30d-8a76-59fd-9afe-7895db4d14c1)
Laura sighed. Her perfectly orchestrated schedule for the day had been blown to heck by her obstetrician running nearly two hours late. Not that she begrudged some other patient an emergency C-section. But today, of all days, she’d really needed her doctor to be on time. Because of the delay, she hadn’t had time to swing by home and drop off the baby with the nanny before this important meeting with Nick’s lawyers.
She winced at the sliding noise of her minivan’s side door. Baby Ellie, six weeks old today, was asleep inside, and Laura desperately needed her to stay that way for the next hour. She detached the baby carrier from the car seat base, threw the baby bag over her shoulder and hurried across the parking lot toward the glass and chrome high-rise housing Tatum and Associates, the law firm that would be representing Nick in the upcoming AbaCo trial.
Nick was the star witness for the prosecution. As such, Carter Tatum expected him to come under withering cross-examination by the defense lawyers representing the company’s chief of security, Hans Kurtis Schroder. He’d been accused of masterminding a kidnapping and human-trafficking ring using AbaCo ships without the company’s knowledge. Personally, Laura doubted Schroder was the top dog in the scheme. He was the sacrificial lamb to protect his bosses.
Today was a coaching session for Nick in how to act on the witness stand. It was guaranteed to be stressful. A part of her that she was trying darned hard to ignore worried that Nick wouldn’t be able to handle it. But he’d endured worse. He’d be fine, right?
She stepped out of the elevator and a receptionist ushered her to a plush conference room. Nick smiled and came over to relieve her of baby and bag. Her heart still swelled when he looked at her like that, so tall and dark and handsome. He’d filled out in the past year, lost the gaunt pallor, rebuilt the athletic physique that had first caught her attention in Paris. A shorter haircut than he’d worn then gave him a polished air that felt more Wall Street than European Bohemian. He cut a smashingly gorgeous figure. Her hands itched to get inside his shirt.
As observant as ever, his gaze went dark and smoky. “You are quite a temptation, yourself,” he murmured. “Shall we cancel this meeting and go somewhere private?”
She smiled regretfully even as she leaned toward him, pulled in by his magnetic appeal and completely uninterested in resisting it. He stepped forward and his head lowered toward hers. Her breath hitched and she was abruptly hot from head to toe.
A door burst open behind her and several people walked into the room. Nick’s gaze shifted briefly to the intruders and then, ignoring them, he completed the kiss. It was a relatively chaste thing, but her toes still curled into tight little knots of pleasure in her Jimmy Choos heels.
“Ahh. You’re here, Ms. Delaney. Good. We can get started.”
“Sorry I’m late,” she murmured. “The doctor was backed up, and I had no time to get home and back here.”
Nick cupped her elbow, escorting her to the table and holding her chair for her. “And how’s our little angel?” he asked, gazing down at his daughter fondly.
Laura’s heart swelled at the adoration in his voice. “Mother and daughter both received clean bills of health.” More precisely, daughter was over her mild jaundice, and mother was finally cleared to have sex again. The past six weeks of abstinence had been murder on her. Nick had just laughed, saying that five years locked up had taught him a great deal of patience.
“Can I get you something to drink, darling?” Nick asked. She shook her head, and his fingers brushed lightly across the back of her neck as he made his way to his own seat. She shivered from head to toe in anticipation of tonight.
Carter Tatum spoke from the end of the table. “This afternoon we’re going to try to approximate how AbaCo’s lawyers will question Nick. As unpleasant as it may be, I would remind you we’re on your side.”
Laura, a former CIA operative, had been through training at their infamous Farm, and she highly doubted a bunch of lawyers could throw anything at Nick that she hadn’t seen before.
Carter gestured and in short order a trio of lawyers was taking turns rapid-firing questions at Nick. They started with his kidnapping. The Paris police believed he’d been drugged at the Paris Opera and taken to the shipping container in which he spent the next five years. Nick denied remembering any of it. If only she’d gone to the opera with Nick that night, but her CIA partner—and ex-lover, truth be told—had been missing, and she’d been following up a lead.
The lawyers pressed Nick about any enemies who might have paid people to ghost him, and she listened with interest. This was a subject he’d flatly refused to discuss with her. It worried her mightily that whoever’d had him kidnapped was waiting to pounce again. Again, he denied knowing anything.
The next lawyer pushed harder and Nick’s shoulders climbed defensively. When the third lawyer pressed even more aggressively for information about Nick’s past, he crossed his arms stubbornly and quit speaking altogether. Darn it. That was the same thing he did to her whenever she brought up the subject.
“Water break,” Carter announced abruptly.
Laura released the breath she’d been holding. Nick slumped in his chair, his head down. She put a supportive hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he answered roughly. But his arm trembled beneath her palm, and his jaw clenched so hard he looked about ready to crack a molar.
She suggested gently, “Let’s call this for today. We’ll come back another time when you’re feeling better—”
“We finish it now,” he snapped uncharacteristically.
She drew back, startled. Nothing ever flustered Nick. He was always the soul of gentlemanly composure.
“I’m sorry.” He sighed. “I have no past. It’s over and gone. My life started anew when you rescued me. This is who I am now. You are my life. You and the kids.”
She appreciated the sentiment, but he was going to have to face his past eventually. The psychiatrists had told her repeatedly not to push him, to let him investigate his previous life at his own speed. But it had about killed her to contain her curious nature for so long.
The lawyers’ badgering resumed, continuing until Nick finally declared, “Gentlemen, this line of questioning is over. My past is not relevant to the fact that I spent five years in an AbaCo box on an AbaCo ship at the hands of kidnappers in the employ of AbaCo.”
Laura stared. It was the first time he’d shown even a flash of the decisive streak he’d had in abundance in Paris.
Carter replied mildly, “AbaCo’s lawyers will, without question, go on a fishing expedition into your past in hopes of finding something they can make seem relevant.”
Nick scowled. “As far as I know, I never had anything to do with AbaCo before I wound up on that damned ship.”
The lawyer sighed. “President Nixon’s lawyers had the eighteen-minute gap to explain. We’ve got your five-year blackout to overcome. Have your doctors said anything more about the chances of you regaining some portion of your memory?”
Nick shrugged. “They think everything’s gone for good. I remember Laura’s face, and that’s it.”
“Can’t you remember something from before your memory loss to give you a clue about who you are and what you do?”
“I know who I am and what I do. I’m Nick Cass, and I spend every waking moment enjoying my family.”
The lawyer looked regretful, but said firmly, “You’re going to be under oath at the trial, and I guarantee they’ll ask you for explicit details of your past. If you won’t talk, they’ll have investigators dig up everything they can find.”
Laura observed closely as Nick’s gaze went hard. Closed. He’d never talked with her about his past in Paris before he disappeared, either. What was the big secret? She’d lay odds he wasn’t a criminal. She’d worked with plenty of them over the years, and he just didn’t have the right personality for it. He was too honorable, too concerned about doing the right thing.
The lawyers started up again, asking about Nick’s connection to AbaCo. He stuck firmly to his story that he’d never had any dealings with AbaCo that he was aware of, and knew of nothing that would’ve provoked the shipping giant to kidnap him of its own volition. Nick maintained steadfastly that his had to have been strictly a kidnapping for hire.
Frankly, she agreed with him. Laura tapped a pencil idly on the pad of paper before her. With first his long months of physical and emotional recovery and then the new baby coming, she’d been distracted enough this past year to abide by his wishes to leave his past alone. But she felt an investigation coming on.
Somebody’d messed with the father of her children, and that meant they’d messed with her. Furthermore, that person or persons might still pose a threat to her man. She smiled wryly. Her mama bear within was in full force these days. Must be the baby hormones raging.
She listened with a mixture of anger and sadness as Nick tonelessly described his incarceration. The psychologists said he had completely disassociated himself from his imprisonment and would have to make peace with it in his own time. For now, though, he held the emotions at arm’s length.
The lawyers moved on to the night of Nick’s rescue. He didn’t have a lot to say about it other than his door opened and a man named Jagger Holtz let him out, and Holtz and Laura led him to safety.
The lawyers left alone the events to follow Nick’s rescue—his weeks in a hospital recovering from various illnesses and malnutrition, his paranoia, the long silences, his difficulties with crowds and open spaces. None of that would help AbaCo’s case, apparently.
Then the lawyers attacked the veracity of Nick’s whole story, claiming it was entirely too far-fetched to be true, doing their damnedest to trip him up or get him to contradict himself. The only evidence he had of this supposed capture of his was a grainy video that could just as easily have been faked, and they demanded to know why he had it in for AbaCo.
She was ready to explode herself by the time Nick surged up out of his chair. “Why do I have to withstand this sort of character assassination? I’m the victim here! And now you make me a victim a second time!”
Carter nodded soberly. “You are correct. It’s the nature of our legal system that the victim often endures outright assault in the courtroom. That’s what we’re here to prepare you to face.”
Nick shoved a hand through his hair. “Why exactly do I have to testify?”
“Because AbaCo will try to convince the jury that the video is faked. The government has to have your direct testimony that the events on the tape are real.”
“Other people were there that night. Why not put my rescuers on the stand?” He sent Laura a quick, apologetic look, no doubt at the notion of dumping this mess into her lap. Not that she minded. She’d love to say a thing or two about AbaCo to a jury.
Carter grinned. “AbaCo won’t touch Laura with a ten-foot pole. She’s a former government agent, which gives her credibility, and they bloody well don’t want to give her a chance to vent her righteous fury in front of a jury…. The mother of your child alone and frantic for years? Oh, no. Way too damaging a story for AbaCo.”
He omitted the part where the government prosecutors wouldn’t put her on the stand because she’d illegally obtained most of the information that led to Nick’s rescue. They’d rather not open up that can of worms for AbaCo to pry into.
After his outburst, Nick settled into stoic silence, refusing to respond to any of the leading and obnoxious questions the lawyers threw at him. No matter what they tried, they couldn’t shake him. Laura was proud of him, but she didn’t like the way he was hunching into his chair, physically withdrawing into himself. He was approaching overload but too macho to admit it.
Thankfully, Ellie woke up and gave Nick the excuse he clearly needed to call a halt for the day. Laura gathered up their fussing daughter apologetically and adjourned to the minivan to nurse and change her.
Nick came outside a few minutes later and stopped by the van to tell her to drive carefully. With troubled eyes, she watched him guide his sporty BMW out of the parking lot. A worrisome, brittle quality clung to him.
Ahh, well. She would make that all go away tonight. The nanny had instructions to entertain the kids for the evening, leaving her and Nick to enjoy a romantic dinner by themselves in the master suite. Smiling, she turned out of the parking lot and pointed the minivan south toward the rolling hills of Virginia’s horse country and home.
Nick drove like a man possessed. Heck, maybe he was possessed. What madness was this to subject himself to cross-examination under oath with as many secrets as he clearly had to hide?
If Laura ever found out he wasn’t who he said he was …
She couldn’t find out. Period. He had too good a thing going, they had too good a thing going, to let anyone mess it up. As appealing as revenge against the bastards who’d held him captive might be, it was a no-brainer that his family came first. He’d made that choice months ago, and he’d had no reason to regret it since.
Someone honked at him. He jerked his attention back to the highway and the traffic streaming along it. He could do this. He could hold himself and his life together. One day at time. One hour or one minute at a time if that’s what it took. The only honest and good things in his life were Laura and the kids. He wasn’t about to lose them.
As the city turned into suburbs and the suburbs into open countryside, his jumpiness increased. After all that time in a shipping container, he’d have thought he would love nothing more than big, blue skies and broad horizons stretching away into infinity. But it turned out the exact opposite was the case. He’d become so used to living in a tiny, mostly dark space that anything else seemed strange and scary.
The panic attack started with sweaty palms and clenching the steering wheel until his knuckles hurt. Then his forehead broke out in a sweat, and an urge to crawl under a blanket in the backseat nearly overcame him.
As Laura’s estate came into view, he stopped the car and parked by the side of the road. He had to pull himself together before he got home and scared her or the kids. He hyperventilated until he saw spots before he managed to slow his breathing. He concentrated on Adam’s laughter, on Ellie’s tiny perfection, on Laura’s warm brown eyes looking at him with such love it made his heart hurt.
Gradually, his pulse slowed. He mopped his forehead dry. There wasn’t anything he could do about his sweat-soaked shirt, but hopefully Laura would put it down to the grilling earlier from the lawyers. Relishing the car’s smooth purr, he put it into gear.
After keying in his security code he drove through the tall iron gates, as always enjoying the bucolic sight of Laura’s prized horses grazing in manicured pastures behind freshly painted oak fences. As he pulled into the six-car garage, he was relieved to see that Laura’s van wasn’t inside yet.
Mumbling a greeting to Marta, the housekeeper, he hurried upstairs to take a shower. The enclosed shower stall with its rain-heads and steam jets soothed away the last remnants of his panic attack. When he emerged from his dressing room/walk-in closet, he heard Laura cooing to Ellie in the nursery. She was a great mom. It added a whole new dimension to the courageous woman who’d rescued him and spent the past year saving his soul.
He poked his head into the nursery. “Anything I can do to help?”
Laura smiled up at him. “I’m afraid you lack the proper anatomical equipment to provide what Ellie wants at the moment.” He gazed at his daughter’s silky, dark head nestled against the pale globe of Laura’s breast. He might have missed Adam’s babyhood—another outrage to lay at his kidnappers’ feet—but he was savoring every minute of Ellie’s.
“Dinner will be ready in a half hour,” Laura murmured. “I’ve asked Marta to serve it in our rooms.”
He nodded and retreated to the other end of the hall to play with Adam. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sleep with Laura. Far from it. She was as generous and adventurous in bed as she was in life. It was just that he was still rattled from the interrogation, panicked that his past was about to rear its ugly head and ruin all of this perfection. What had happened during those lost years to make him hide his identity, even from the woman he loved?
“Daddeeeeeee!”
Grinning, he braced himself as Adam launched into the air and splatted against Nick’s chest. He caught his son’s small, wriggly form against his, savoring the smell of soap that clung to the boy’s still-damp hair.
“Did you do anything fun today?” he asked as Adam dragged him over to the corner to play with the toy du jour—Hot Wheels race cars.
Adam described his day in charming detail while the two of them built an elaborate racetrack. With dark hair and blue-on-blue eyes so like his own, Adam bent over the task with concentration far beyond his years. He was a frighteningly intelligent child and would go far in life if he used his talents to their maximum potential. They laughed together as too tight a turn sent cars shooting off the track and across the room in spectacular crashes.
Lisbet, the English and shockingly Mary Poppins-like nanny, interrupted the crash fest to announce that Adam’s dinner, and Mummy and Daddy’s, were served. Nick gave his son a bear hug and tickled him until Adam was squealing with laughter before turning him over to Lisbet.
Nick stepped into the private sitting room in their suite and stopped in surprise. The space was lit by hundreds of candles and a white-linen-covered table sat alone in the middle. A red rose in a crystal bud vase sat between the two place settings, and a sumptuous meal was laid out. Marta had really outdone herself. It was some sort of exotic fowl served en croute—grouse, maybe. Among other things, the German woman was a Cordon Bleu-trained chef. A real treasure. But then Laura didn’t settle for less than the best in any aspect of her life. She’d be as intimidating as hell if she weren’t such a genuinely warm and kind person. No doubt about it. He didn’t deserve her.
Laura stepped out of her dressing room and his breath caught. She was wearing a little black dress that highlighted her newly slender body, which had already mostly regained its pre-pregnancy shape partly due to long hours with a personal trainer over the past month. Frankly, the additional curves added to her appeal.
“You look ravishing,” he announced.
“And you are as handsome as always,” she replied as he held her chair for her.
Something within her called to him at a fundamental level, a pull at his soul to protect her and make her happy. It went so far beyond mere attraction he didn’t know how to give it a name. Even calling it love didn’t seem adequate to encompass his need for her or the bond he felt with her. Maybe it was sharing parenthood of two amazing children.
Or maybe it was the fact that he owed his life to her. He would never forget the sight of her the night he was freed. His own private angel. And then the long months of patiently nursing him back to health, gradually convincing him his ordeal was actually over. Putting up with his unwillingness to face his past. And through it all, her love had been steadfast.
He wondered sometimes if there was anything that could shake her loyalty to him. What was it that lurked so dark and frightening in his past? Was it bad enough to drive her away? It really wasn’t something he wanted to find out.
“How are you holding up after being raked over the coals by those lawyers?” Laura asked.
He shrugged. “Today wasn’t fun. But I expect the trial will be worse.”
She sighed. “It’ll all be over in a few weeks, and then we can get on with our lives.”
His gaze dropped involuntarily to her naked left hand. She never once hinted at it, but she had to be thinking about marriage and wondering why he never brought it up. The truth was, he didn’t know if he was married or not, and the only way to find out would be to investigate those ominous, lost years.
He picked up his water glass—since Laura couldn’t drink wine while nursing, he wasn’t drinking either—and said, “A toast. To a long and happy future for us and our family.”
She sipped her water and then asked reflectively, “Why don’t you ever talk about the past?”
He frowned. “I’ve told you why.” Repeatedly, in fact.
“I’m concerned that, with all the publicity this trial’s going to receive, whoever had you kidnapped five years ago will see you and come after you again.”
He swore mentally. He hadn’t thought about the publicity. Was there some way to declare a moratorium on filming or photographing him during the trial?
“Talk to me, Nick. Between the two of us, we can beat any threat that comes our way.”
A naïve notion at best. “My previous life happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Let it be.”
“The psychiatrists keep telling me to let you deal with your imprisonment and the memory loss in your own time. But I have a gut feeling that your time is running out.”
So did he.
Thankfully, she let the subject drop. For now. He had no doubt she would bring it up again, though. And one of these days, she wasn’t going to back off. She’d insist they find answers. His throat tightened until he could hardly swallow the delicious food. What the hell was he going to do? His entire being shied away from thinking about the past. What could have freaked him out at such a soul-deep level? He put the problem in a mental drawer and slammed it shut. Later. He’d think about it later.
They finished eating, and he changed the music. “Dance with me?” he asked her.
“I thought you’d never ask, Mr. Cass.”
Nick held a hand out to her and she took it, rising gracefully to her feet. She wasn’t particularly tall, but she made up for it by being impossibly elegant in build. He might not remember meeting her, but he had no trouble understanding why he’d fallen for her the first time around. Or the second time around. He figured falling in love with the same woman twice was proof positive he’d chosen the right one.
She came into his arms, soft and willing and smelling of Chanel No. 5, his favorite. “Have I told you today that I love you?” he murmured as they swayed to the slow jazz tune.
“I do believe you’ve been remiss in that department.”
“My sincere apologies. Perhaps I can show you how much I love you instead?”
She laughed. “I really never thought you’d ask that. I was beginning to think you didn’t miss making love with me.”
“Ahh, sweet Laura. I was only trying to think of your health. I will want to make love to you until the day I die.”
“Here’s hoping that’s a very long time from now.”
He smiled down at her. “I don’t know about you, but I’m planning to live to be one hundred and fifty years old.”
“That sounds like a plan.”
They danced in silence after that, letting anticipation build between them. Finally, he turned her in his arms toward the bedroom. Her dress had a long zipper, which he drew down by slow degrees as they went, his fingers dipping inside to relish her satin skin and the inward curve of her back. Gratitude swelled in his heart for whatever fate had brought them together.
For her part, Laura tugged his shirt clear of his trousers and made a slow production of unbuttoning it, kissing her way down his chest button by button. His stomach muscles contracted hard as she approached his belt buckle. Her clever fingers did away with that barrier, and then he was sucking in his breath hard, falling back onto the bed when she pushed him gently. She’d obviously given tonight a great deal of thought, and he was happy to go along with her plans for them. For now, at least.
She took her time, teasing him until his entire body thrummed with terrible tension. Finally he rolled over to return the favor. He kissed every inch of her body, re-acquainting himself with it, enjoying the new firmness across her flat stomach, loving the extra fullness in her breasts—and the added sensitivity that came with it. Her soft gasps of pleasure were just as he remembered, the way she arched up into his hands, the fire in her eyes as he stroked her body until it sang for him.
A shadow of fear crossed his mind, but he shoved it away. Nothing must hurt her. Hurt them. He ordered himself to stay in the moment. Focus on the now. “You drive me out of my mind,” he muttered against her skin. “I’ll never get enough of you.”
Moaning as his fingers made magic upon her body, she pulled him down to her impatiently. “Nick,” she gasped, “Please. I’ve waited so long for you. I want you now.”
Ahh, always direct, his Laura. “I could never deny you what you want, my love.”
Taking into consideration her long abstinence, he entered her gently, stunned at how tight and slick she was. She surged up against him immediately, crying out in pleasure. Her eyes glazed the way they always did when they made love, and he relished the way she bit her lower lip. As if she’d actually be able to hold back the cries of pleasure about to claim her. He withdrew slightly and then filled her again in a single slow stroke. She cried out against his shoulder, shuddering from head to foot.
He smiled down at her. “Let us see just how much pleasure you can stand, shall we?”
He paced himself carefully, driving her farther and farther over the edge. With each climax, her smile became more brilliant, her eyes more limpid, his own pleasure more intense. And the happier he became, the more afraid he became. He drove himself mercilessly, forcing himself not to think of the darkness creeping up on him, holding it back from Laura by sheer force of will.
Finally, when his mental strength was at an end, the battle lost, he gave in to the dark tide sweeping over him, surging into her, driving her over the edge one last time. As they climaxed together, it was so magnificent and terrible that, as tears of joy ran down her face, he wasn’t far from tears himself. Tears of sheer terror. The better things were between them, the more certain he was that all of it could end at any moment.
He was losing it. Happiness made him unhappy. Joy terrified him. It was all coming apart before his eyes, his life unraveling because he was too screwed up just to enjoy what they had. But he couldn’t shake the sense of something bad approaching, something stealthy and evil. And it was coming for him.
“I love you, Nick.” Her gaze was clear, untroubled. She sensed nothing, and she had the finely honed instincts of a CIA agent. Desperate, he ordered himself to hold on. Keep it together. He mustn’t lose what little sanity he had.
He rolled to his side, propping himself up on one elbow to gaze down at her. “I love you, too, darling.” Must concentrate on that. Laura. Love. The darkness retreated a little from his mind. His left hand idly stroked down her rosy body. “Better?” he murmured.
“Spectacular. I feel like a woman again.”
He leaned down to kiss her. “You were always a woman. A beautiful one. You’re an amazing mother, and it only makes you sexier.”
“You’re just saying that to be polite.”
“No, I’m not.” He frowned. “Never doubt your attractiveness. The more sides of you I see, the more attracted to you I am.”
“Never change, Nick.”
If only. He felt as if he’d been living in a state of suspended animation for the past year. As if time was passing, but he wasn’t really living. As Laura drifted to sleep beside him, the darkness pushed forward again, nearly choking him with certainty that this sweet interlude was about to end, and life was about to come looking for him with payback in mind.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_fedf9398-0319-532b-b046-c2c60744f0ca)
The bedside clock had passed 2 a.m. when Nick gave up on sleep. He slid out from under the covers and dressed quietly, tiptoeing downstairs in anticipation of Ellie’s imminent feeding. He pulled a bottle of pumped breast milk out of the refrigerator, warmed it in the microwave and went back upstairs.
Turning off the baby monitor, he sat down in the rocking chair to wait. Sure enough, in about ten minutes, the baby started to stir. He picked her up, inhaling the sweet scent of her. “Good evening, little angel. What say we let Mommy sleep tonight?”
Ellie, a happy and cooperative baby, readily took the bottle from him, snuggling close against his chest with a trust that took his breath away. He loved Laura with all his being, but the feelings that swelled in his heart as he gazed down at his daughter pushed his capacity for love to new heights he’d heretofore had no idea existed. Adoration mixed with protectiveness, hope for her future, and wonder at the miracle of her existence expanded in his heart to make room for his tiny daughter.
He changed her as she grew sleepy and rocked her for just a minute or two before her eyes closed. He laid her down gently in her crib and watched her sleep until it dawned on him that he was standing there grinning like a blessed fool.
Restless, he wandered downstairs. Predictably, his feet carried him to his office. Or more accurately to his laptop computer. He sat down at his desk in the dark and cranked it up. He didn’t stop to question what he was doing. It was time.
He typed in the name, Nikolas Spiros, and hit the search button. Skipping the tabloids, he read story after story from the business pages chronicling the tragic mental breakdown of Greece’s richest shipping magnate. There were even pictures of him, bearded and wild looking. Abrupt memory flashed of his captors hanging a white sheet in his box and taking pictures of him standing in front of it. Bastards.
According to the articles, he’d been institutionalized at a private facility. Later stories talked about his withdrawal from public life. His wish to live quietly and not involve himself with business affairs. How in the hell could anyone who’d known him have believed that drivel? He’d loved running Spiros Shipping. Had thrived on it. The company had been his life, dammit!
He checked his anger. Nikolas Spiros was dead—or at least resting comfortably in an asylum and happy to stay there.
His shipping company had been sold quietly about a year after his “breakdown.” Such a pleasant word for such an unpleasant thing as kidnapping. An entirely new management group had taken over the company. A bunch of Germans. They’d renamed it—
His heart nearly stopped right then and there. Spiros Shipping had been renamed AbaCo. The betrayal of it was breathtaking. He’d been kidnapped and held by his own employees! Had they known who he was? Had he been that bad a boss? Surely not. Morale had been great at Spiros before his memory went black. A sense of family had pervaded the firm. Sure, the work had been hard and times were tough, but he’d prided himself in never laying off an employee and paying as much as he could afford to every single worker. Surely so much hadn’t changed after his memories stopped that his employees would have turned on him so violently and completely.
In shock, he researched the financials of his renamed company. Profits were down, but AbaCo was still in the black. He shrugged. It would have been darned hard not to make money given how financially sound the company had been when he last remembered it. He studied the quarterly earnings reports for the past few years and cracks were definitely starting to show. But nothing that couldn’t be corrected with wise and careful management for a few years—
Not his company any more.
At least not in any way that mattered. He had Laura and the kids. And at all costs, this other part of his life had to be kept away from them. The new owners could have Spiros Shipping.
Best to just stay hidden. A ghost.
But how in the hell was he supposed to do that with this trial coming up?
What had happened to Nikolas Spiros? Had he gone mad for real? Had something horrible happened at the shipping company that had driven him over the edge? What would leave such a residue of terror within him?
The walls of his office started to close in on him unpleasantly—which was a first—and he actually felt a driving need to get out of there. He erased his browsing history and shut down the computer before heading for the kitchen.
Pulling on a jacket, he turned off the elaborate security system and headed out the back door toward the woods behind the house. Tonight he didn’t feel up to trekking across one of the pastures and challenging his agoraphobia. He’d been taking secret hikes for several months now, trying to desensitize himself to open spaces. It was getting better, but by maddeningly slow degrees.
He’d been walking for a few minutes when the panic attack hit. It slammed into him like a freight train, sudden and overwhelming. He stopped, breathing as if he’d been sprinting, and glanced around in terror. And then something odd dawned on him. This panic attack was different. It was accompanied by a strange certainty that he was being watched. Great. Was he slipping back into the paranoia of the early days, too?
He couldn’t help himself. He slid into the darkest shadow he could find and crouched, pressing his back against the trunk of a huge sycamore. He let his gaze roam, his peripheral vision taking in a wide angle view of the woods. The night sounds had gone dead silent. Maybe he wasn’t so paranoid, after all. The crickets never lied.
Who else was out here? And why?
The motion sensors at the house would warn of any human-sized intruders … if he hadn’t turned the alarm system off before he came out here. He swore at himself. Laura and the kids were unprotected. He had to get back to the house. Get the alarms back on. Protect his family.
He stood up and was stunned to discover his feet wouldn’t move. Literally. By sheer force of will, he overcame his panic, ignoring the hyperventilation, ignoring the wild imaginings of being kidnapped again, crammed in another box. His family came first, dammit. He’d die for them!
His stumbling walk turned into a jog, and finally into a full-out run. Whether he was running toward Laura or away from the bogeyman in the woods, he couldn’t say. But either way, his long legs devoured the distance with powerful strides and his lungs burned with exertion by the time the mansion came into sight. Its Georgian grandeur was dark. Quiet. Undisturbed.
The silliness of his terror struck him forcefully. His mind was playing tricks on him. It was only his past pursuing him. A figment of his imagination. With a last look over his shoulder into the shadows of the night, he let himself into the house and turned on the security system.
Shaken to his core, he climbed the stairs quietly. No sense waking everyone because he’d had a panic attack. He put his hand on the doorknob to let himself into the master suite, but he couldn’t bring himself to enter. He was still too wired to lie down beside Laura as if everything was perfectly normal.
Instead, he headed for another door farther down the hall. A small, walk-in linen closet. About six feet by eight feet inside, its tight quarters felt like a comforting embrace. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor, his elbows on his knees and his head on his arms. He had to get over this. Get a grip on himself. But how? If anything, he was getting worse, not better.
As understanding as Laura tried to be, she couldn’t begin to comprehend what he’d been through, what the past few years had been like. It was his own private hell, and no one could climb into it with him and lead him out. He was lost, and getting more lost by the day. Oh, the shrinks said all the right things, but they had no more clue what he’d been through, really, than Laura did. They had a little more book learning about it, had a list of suggestions to offer out of some counseling text, but their psychobabble was mostly crap.
How could everything be so perfect and yet so screwed up? He ought to be insanely happy. But instead, he was marching at a brisk pace toward the mental meltdown he’d been falsely accused of having six years ago.
There hadn’t been anyone in the woods. A deer or some other creature had moved, and the crickets had gone quiet for a minute. He’d flipped out over nothing. So why was his fight-or-flight response still in full readiness? He took several deep, calming breaths, the way the yoga instructor had taught him, breathing out the fear and stress.
It accomplished exactly nothing, dammit.
He sat there, panting in terror for who knew how long when, without warning, the door swung open. He started to surge to his feet when a little voice whispered, “Daddy?”
Nick sank back down to the floor, his heart about pounding through his rib cage. “Hey, buddy. What are you doing up at this hour?”
“I dreamed a bad man was coming for me.”
He held out an arm to Adam, who wasted no time climbing into his lap. “No bad man will ever get you. Mommy and I will always protect you and keep you safe.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?” Adam added.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he repeated. “Need a pinkie swear on it, too?”
Adam held out his right pinkie finger, and Nick hooked his much larger finger in his son’s. They shook on it soberly.
“Why are you in the closet, Daddy? Are you hiding from the bad man, too?”
“I didn’t want to wake up you and Ellie and Mommy, and I needed some time to think.”
Adam’s little palms rested on his cheeks. “Is your heart hurting again?”
Since when were five-year-olds so damned perceptive? “I guess it is, a little. I’m so happy it hurts. I think about all the ways it could go wrong …”
Adam nodded wisely. “And then you’re not so happy anymore.”
He stared down at his son, but it was too dark to make out his face. “Nothing’s going to go wrong, Adam. Not if I can help it.”
“Don’t be scared, Daddy.”
“I won’t if you won’t. We can be brave for each other.
Okay?”
Adam nodded against his chest. They cuddled in the dark for several more minutes, and predictably, the boy drifted back to sleep, his nightmare long gone. Nick stood awkwardly, careful not to wake his son, and carried him back to his rocket-ship bed. He tucked the little boy in and kissed his forehead, memorizing Adam’s face in that peaceful moment.
He was going to defeat his own demons if it killed him. No way was he about to let his paranoia bleed over to his children and damage them. And furthermore, his past wasn’t going to hurt them, either. He knew what he had to do. And he had to do it alone. Leaving no note that Laura could use to track him down, he treaded quietly back down the stairs, this time being sure to reactivate the alarm from the panel in the garage, and headed out into the night.
* * *
Laura woke up to Ellie’s fussing amplified through the baby monitor, disoriented at how well rested she felt and that the first light of dawn was peeking in around the curtains. She looked at the clock. Six o’clock? Nick must’ve taken the 2:00 a.m. feeding, bless him. She rolled over to thank him and was startled to see his side of the bed empty. He hadn’t struggled with insomnia for months, now.
Shrugging, she got up, threw on a bathrobe and headed for her daughter. Ellie was hungry, and nursed for longer than usual. Laura carried her into the bathroom and laid her on a big soft bath towel on the heated floor while Mommy jumped into the shower. She dressed herself and Ellie and headed downstairs in search of Nick.
He wasn’t in the kitchen watching the financial news and drinking coffee, as was his habit. She strolled through the entire downstairs and didn’t find him. Had he crawled into bed with Adam sometime last night? He did that now and then when Adam had a particularly scary nightmare. The boy had had periodic bouts with them ever since a team of killers had broken into the house after Nick’s rescue in search of her and Nick. Thankfully, the babysitter had gotten them into the mansion’s panic room and locked it down before Adam was hurt or worse. But the incident had left its mark on the little boy.
She headed upstairs and peeked into Adam’s room. He was sleeping alone. A low-level hum of alarm started in Laura’s gut. She checked the linen closet and Nick’s walk-in closet. No sign of him.
She pulled out her cell phone and dialed his. Not in service? What was going on? She ran down to the garage to check the cars—they were all in their places. The alarm system was still on, too. Where had he gone? He hated being outdoors. It wasn’t like he’d have gone for a morning stroll.
Starting at one end of the house, she searched it methodically, checking every place a grown man could possibly hide. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
Memories of Paris flashed through her head with horrifying clarity. How he’d just disappeared. No trace. No evidence. No ransom call. Nothing. He’d just been gone. Please, God. Not again. She couldn’t live through losing him again. Not like that.
An hour later, she was on the phone to the police and local hospitals. Nada. And then she started calling their friends and associates, the early hour of the morning be damned. No one had seen or heard from him overnight. Panic hovered, vulture-like, waiting to close in on her.
Adam came downstairs and didn’t help matters one bit by immediately picking up on her stress. The child was far too observant for his own good sometimes. “What’s wrong, Mommy? Where’s Daddy?”
“I don’t know, honey. But there’s nothing to worry about.”
Adam frowned. “His heart is hurting again.”
She turned on the child quickly. “Why do you say that, sweetie?”
“He was in the towel closet again last night.”
“When last night?”
Adam shrugged. “It was dark. I had a bad dream and was coming to sleep with you. I heard him breathing funny in there.”
“What did he say?” She tried not to sound hysterical but suspected she’d failed when Adam frowned worriedly.
“He promised he’d keep me safe from the bad man. He pinkie swore.” The little boy started to cry. “The bad man got him, didn’t he?”
She gathered him into her arms. “Daddy? Are you kidding? He’s big and strong and smart. No bad man has a chance against your daddy.”
But the bad man had gotten Nick once before. Had history sickeningly repeated itself? Had he been ghosted out of their lives yet again?
Chapter 4 (#ulink_0ab13e3e-2f2e-50ad-8f2e-de58c07a8b8a)
“May I help you, sir?” The receptionist at the swanky Boston law firm was predictably beautiful and efficient.
Nick replied, “I’m here to see William Ward.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, and please don’t tell him I’m here. It’s a surprise.” He flashed his most charming smile at her. He wasn’t vain about his looks, but very few women could resist him when he turned the charm all the way up.
She simpered something about being delighted to help. He waved off her offer to show him the way and strode down the familiar hallways. A feeling akin to déjà vu passed over him. This place was from another existence, another life, familiar and yet entirely strange to him.
He stepped into Ward’s office and the man glanced up. “Sweet Jesus!” he gasped, falling back in his chair heavily. “Is that really you?”
Nick closed the door and stepped up to the desk. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, William.”
“My God. Where have you been? The things they said about you—”
Nick propped his hip on a corner of William’s expansive desk. “What did my kidnappers say to explain my absence, anyway?”
“Kidnappers?” The lawyer stared, aghast. “The reports said you had a mental breakdown. Had to be institutionalized. There were doctor’s statements. Psychological evaluations. Pictures. You looked like hell.”
“Lies. All of it,” Nick said shortly.
William’s shocked pallor was giving way to a sickly shade of green. “Was our power of attorney over your estate illegal, then? What about your signatures on all those sales documents?”
“What documents?”
“The ones signing over your company to the new management group? Were those real?”
“I never signed anything, to my knowledge.” He hoped. Surely he never would have signed away Spiros Shipping under any circumstances.
It took William a few seconds to quit spluttering and form words. “Please forgive me for asking, I mean no disrespect. But have you been in a sufficiently … alert … mental condition for all of the past six years to know for certain that you never signed any legal documents?”
Nick swore under his breath. God only knew what he’d done during the blackout years. “I’m actually not here to talk about my company. And to answer your question, I was kidnapped and imprisoned for five years. It has taken me most of the past year to recover physically from the ordeal.”
The lawyer devolved into a shockingly uncharacteristic bout of mumbling to himself. Poor guy must really be shaken up. Eventually, William collected himself enough to go into attorney mode. “I’m going to need an affidavit from you describing exactly what happened to you in detail. I don’t have any idea how we’re going to contest the sale of your company. It’s going to cause a massive uproar to try to get it back—”
Nick interrupted the man sharply. “I don’t want it back. That’s not why I’m here.”
William stared blankly. “Why are you here, then?”
“I need you to tell me about the last two years before I … disappeared.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Nick sighed. “It’s a long story, but I’ve experienced a memory loss as a result of a blow to the head. I need your help to fill in the gap.”
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
William nodded dubiously. “I’ll do what I can.”
The lawyer started talking and Nick listened grimly. He’d thought if he heard about the lost time it would jog his memory, but none of the names or places or dates rang any bells. His memory wasn’t just buried. It was truly gone. The danger of the black hole loomed even larger as the true depth of it became clear to him.
“I can get all these facts off the internet, William. Tell me what I was like. How I was acting.”
The lawyer spoke of Nikolas growing bored with running a company that functioned like a well-oiled machine pretty much on its own. Of his forays into ever more dangerous hobbies—skydiving, extreme skiing, boat racing, Formula One car racing. He’d apparently blown through a string of beautiful and ever wilder women as well. He’d become a regular on the pages of the European tabloids. And there’d been the partying. Ward didn’t say if he’d dabbled in drinking or drugs, just that the lawyer had been very worried about his longtime client.
Finally, he fell silent.
Nick didn’t even know where to begin processing the information dump he’d just received. It was odd to hear about his own life and feel so completely disconnected from it. Nothing the man had described would account for the pervasive terror that was the only thing he’d carried forward from that time. Nick asked grimly, “Was I—Did I … get married?”
William looked surprised. “There were rumors of a quickie wedding just before you disappeared. But I hadn’t seen you for a few weeks prior to that. I couldn’t say.”
Rumors of a wedding? Nick swore under his breath. “Do you know how I came by the Nick Cass identity?”
The attorney cleared his throat. “During that time, you occasionally preferred to travel under an alias to avoid the publicity and scandal you were generating.”
He had no memory of being assaulted by paparazzi. “Where did the fake ID come from?”
William visibly squirmed at that one. “For the record, I arranged no such thing. I put you in touch with a gentleman who was expert at facilitating replacement of lost identity documents. Perhaps he was the source of your … alter ego.”
Nick dismissed the lawyer’s double-talk with a flick of his wrist. If he was going to keep up the charade of being Nick Cass and no one but Nick Cass, he had to know everything there was to know about the man. Had someone of that name really existed at some point, or was Nick Cass an entirely made-up entity? “I need to get in touch with the fellow who made those documents. I need to know more about the identity he provided for me.”
William frowned. “It’s my understanding he’s no longer in the business. He ran into some legal troubles. Last I heard, he left the country in a hurry. I would have no idea how to get in touch with him.”
Damn. Frustrated, Nick moved over to the floor-to-ceiling glass window to stare down at Boston Harbor. His kidnapper surely knew who he really was. But did the people who’d held him captive? Did the powers-that-be at AbaCo? Had it been an inside job, or had his kidnappers merely had a sick sense of humor to have imprisoned him on one of his own ships?
If AbaCo’s lawyers penetrated the Cass identity, they would come after him with both barrels, and the sum total of what he knew about his last years before his capture he’d just heard from the man behind him. He turned to William. “Can you recommend a top-flight private investigator to me? Someone thorough and discreet.”
“Of course.” William looked close to puking in relief that Nick didn’t pursue the fake ID thing any further. As Nick recalled, William had been paid plenty well enough back then that he could darn well suffer a little for the cause now.
“Oh, and one more thing, William.”
The lawyer looked up sharply from the sticky note on which he was copying a name and phone number.
“Don’t tell anyone you’ve seen me. Consider this little visit a privileged interaction between the two of us. As far as you know, I’m still sitting in a padded cell somewhere, staring at my toes and drooling down my chin. Got it?”
The attorney frowned. “I understand. Actually, I don’t understand, but I will abide by your wishes.”
“Thanks, William.”
“Will you tell me the whole story someday?”
“If things go well, you’ll never see or hear from me again.” As the finality of that struck Nick he made brief eye contact with the attorney who’d been a friend and confidante for many years. “Thanks for everything. You’re a good man.”
“You, too. If you ever need anything, just let me know. And good luck.”
Nick turned and left the office. Good luck, indeed. He’d probably need a bona fide miracle before it was all said and done to avoid the clutches of his past.
He waited until he was back in Washington D.C., leaving Reagan International Airport to drive home, before he called Laura. She had too many scary resources with which to track him down for him to risk calling her any sooner. She would be completely freaked out by now, but he’d had no choice. He had to deal with his past on his own. And after hearing what William Ward had to say about his last years leading up to his capture, it had turned out to be a damned good call to keep Laura and the kids far away from the mess he’d apparently made of his life.
Laura answered her cell phone on the first ring with a terse hello.
“Hello, darling. It’s me.”
“Thank God, Nick. Are you all right? Are you hurt? Where are you?”
He felt terrible hearing her panic and relief. Good Lord willing, he’d never scare her like this again. “I’m fine. I’ll be home in about an hour. There was something I had to take care of.”
A pause. “Can you talk to me about it?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. But it’s handled. No worries.” At least he hoped there was nothing to worry about. The P.I. he’d spoken to in Boston had been confident he could find everything that had ever existed on one Nick Cass prior to six years ago. If the man had ever actually existed, Nick would know all about him in a few days.
The cab delivered him to the mansion’s front door in closer to two hours than one—there’d been an accident and traffic was hellish. As he stepped inside, Adam shouted a greeting that warmed Nick all the way to his soul. Laura held herself to a walk as she came to greet him, but she squeezed him so tightly it hurt and he thought he felt a sob shake her momentarily.
“I’m sorry, darling. I knew you’d want to go with me, but I had to take care of a piece of old business on my own.”
Her muffled voice rose from his chest. “Did you kill anyone?”
“No,” he laughed.
“Are we okay?”
His arms tightened convulsively around her. “That’s the whole idea. I love you and the children more than life.” They stood locked together like they’d never let go of each other for a long time. Finally, he murmured, “Am I forgiven?”
“Of course. I could never stay mad at you. If you say you had to do something, then you had to do it. If you can’t talk about it with me, there’s a good reason for that, too. And if you say you love me, I believe you.”
He tilted her chin up to kiss her. “I am, without question, the luckiest man on Earth to have you.”
She stood on tiptoe to kiss him back. “And don’t you ever forget it,” she murmured.
“Never.” Their lips met, and the passion that always simmered between them boiled over immediately. His mouth slanted across hers, and she clung to him eagerly.
“Eeyew! Gross!” Adam exclaimed from the steps above them.
Nick lifted his mouth away from Laura’s and smiled up at his son. “For now, you hold on to that thought, young man. But trust me. In a few years, girls won’t be nearly so disgusting.”
“But Mommy’s not a girl. She’s a … mommy.”
Laura laughed in Nick’s arms. “Gee, thanks, kid.” She scooped up Adam and swung him around until they were all laughing.
And just like that, life was back to the way it was supposed to be. As Nick followed his family toward the kitchen, he experienced an overwhelming sensation of having dodged a bullet.
The sensation lasted exactly one hour. That was when Carter Tatum called to inform him that he was to appear at a pre-trial hearing in three days’ time. Three days for the private investigator to give him enough ammunition to hold off a pack of sharks out to tear him to pieces. It was almost enough to make him reconsider enlisting Laura’s prodigious skill with computers to help him research his Nick Cass identity.
Almost. But not quite.
Laura understood Nick’s nervousness as his first encounter with AbaCo’s lawyers loomed only a few hours away. But there was something else going on with him. He kept checking his cell phone like he was expecting a message, and the longer it didn’t come, the more tense he was quietly becoming. It took knowing him exceedingly well to see the signs of his stress—the tightness around his eyes, the absent quality to some of his comments, the very occasional twitch of a thumb. She had to give Nick credit. He had amazing self-discipline to give away so little as a limousine whisked the two of them toward Washington, D.C.
His self-control held through the hearing, but he wasn’t put on the witness stand and grilled, either. The legal proceeding mostly consisted of motions and technical arguments between the lawyers. As far as she could tell, they were wrangling over the rules of engagement for the trial to come. All in all, it was rather anticlimactic.
The hearing was adjourned, and Nick joined her in the aisle, looping an arm over her shoulder as they stepped outside …
… into a barrage of lights and microphones and shouted questions.
Nick reared back hard beside her, going board stiff. The Tatum team of attorneys leaped forward to intercept the phalanx of reporters, but it was too late. The press had spotted Nick. The story of his kidnapping and rescue had made a brief sensation last year, but thanks to his inability at the time to give interviews and put a poster-boy face to the story, it had faded quickly.
Unfortunately, the media had put two and two together, and they wanted the scoop on the miracle man now. Laura was half-blinded by flashing lights exploding at them from all directions. Good thing she was completely out of her old line of work. One media assault like this would’ve blown her cover permanently.
Nick swore quietly beside her. To the lawyers, he said tersely, “Get us out of here. Now.”
The Tatum support team hustled her and Nick down the front steps and into the waiting limousine. He collapsed on the plush upholstery, swearing steadily under his breath in what sounded like Greek. What was up with that?
The car door closed, and silence descended around them.
He yanked out his cell phone and punched in a number. She caught only the first few digits—617 area code. Boston?
“It’s Nick Cass,” said into the device tersely. “What have you got for me?”
He listened in silence for a long time, his jaw clenching tighter with each passing minute. And then he finally ordered, “Keep looking.”
“Who was that?” Laura asked as he put away his phone.
He looked up at her grimly. It was like staring into the eyes of a total stranger. Cold shock washed over her. Who was this man sitting beside her? She couldn’t ever recall seeing that expression of irritation or determination in his gaze before.
He answered tightly, “That was my past.”
She waited for him to elaborate but was immensely frustrated when he didn’t. It was all she could do not to demand answers right this second. But she’d vowed when she found him to just be grateful that he was alive and accept whatever part of him he chose to share with her, no questions asked. But, darn, that was hard to stick to now!
The ride home was silent, with him lost in his thoughts, and her convincing herself to respecting his privacy. She would not turn her investigative skills on the father of her children, the man she loved with all her heart. She would trust him and take him at his word and support him. But her fingers literally itched to start typing, to dig into the internet and tap her network of resources built up over years of hunting down disappeared and deadbeat dads.
At dinner that night, she and Nick let Adam dominate the conversation with an eager description of his outing with Nanny Lisbet to Colonial Williamsburg that afternoon. Afterwards, Adam went upstairs with Lisbet to take a bath, and Laura and Nick adjourned to the family room. Nick flipped on the news.
Laura started violently as his face flashed up on the flat-screen TV at several times larger than life size. He froze on the sofa beside her.
The reporter narrated over footage from the courthouse this afternoon, recapping the story of Nick’s rescue from a container ship a year before and moving on to report in detail how federal prosecutors were going after several high-ranking AbaCo executives for their roles in Nick’s kidnapping. The reporter devolved into speculating on how high in the company the complicity reached.
Nick turned off the TV, scowling ferociously.
Laura commented soothingly, “It was an essentially accurate report. You came off completely sympathetically. You’re an innocent victim of a heinous crime. And I have to say, you’re incredibly photogenic. The public is going to love you.” She smiled. “Particularly women.”
His scowl deepened and he leaped up off the sofa to pace. He kept mumbling something under his breath that sounded like, “Not good. They’ll see me.”
“Who’ll see you?” she asked carefully.
When he turned to stare at her, it was like looking into the eyes of a wild creature, hunted and cornered. “Everything will be ruined,” he bit out. And with that, he stormed out of the room.
Laura eyed her laptop computer. Just a quick search. Nothing in depth. A brief check to see if something about his past would pop up. No, darn it! She headed for the gym in the basement to drown her temptation in some good old-fashioned sweat.
Nick was restless that night. To her vast disappointment, he didn’t come to bed when she did, and the clock was turning toward 4:00 a.m. when he finally slipped in beside her. His arms went around her and she snuggled into his embrace, pretending to sleep.
But as she lay there in the dark, listening to his quiet breathing, she couldn’t help but wonder who exactly she was in bed with. What in his past had him so frantic? Was he a criminal after all? Who were his enemies? What baggage clung to him? What kind of trouble was he so afraid of bringing to her doorstep? She was a former CIA field agent, for goodness’ sake. What was so bad that he didn’t think she could handle it?
She finally gave up on getting any more rest at around 6 a.m. and eased out of bed quietly so as not to wake Nick. She went to the nursery and scooped up Ellie who, orderly child that she was, was beginning to rouse exactly on time for her 6 a.m. feeding.
“Such a good baby,” Laura crooned as she sat down in the rocking chair in the family room to feed Ellie. As the baby latched on and began sucking hungrily, Laura picked up the remote control and flipped on the TV. Was Nick still the star attraction of the all news channels, or had some real story come along overnight to bump him off the airwaves?
“… reclusive billionaire Nikolas Spiros may have surfaced yesterday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom … appears to be living under a new name … rumors of kidnapping and conspiracy surround his disappearance six years ago after a mental breakdown … unable to contact his people to confirm or deny his identity … you judge for yourself.”
Laura lurched up out of the chair as a photograph of a dashing man in his early thirties was flashed up beside a still picture of Nick yesterday on the courthouse steps.
She knew that younger man very well, indeed. He’d been her lover in Paris six years ago. He was the father of her son. And the man in the other, more recent, picture was the man she lived with now, the father of her daughter. Ellie squawked as she lost her grip on breakfast, and Laura was momentarily distracted resettling the baby.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she murmured. “Mommy was just surprised.”
Although surprised hardly described the sick nausea rumbling through her gut. Nick was a Greek shipping tycoon named Nikolas Spiros? A billionaire? Why had he turned his back on all that? Why did he continue to live under this Nick Cass identity?
Her mind flashed back to Paris. To meeting Nick Cass there. He’d lied to her. He hadn’t told her who he was back then, and he was perpetuating the lie now. No wonder neither she nor her attorney had been able to learn anything about him back then. Nick Cass didn’t exist. The first stirrings of anger started low in her belly, building by steady degrees. Only Ellie’s tiny body nestled against her breast, sucking sleepily, kept her from storming up the stairs and bursting in on Nick—Nikolas—this very second and demanding the full truth and nothing but the truth.
Who in the world was he?
Chapter 5 (#ulink_25db5144-7a21-5a10-8807-2caebf688a9f)
Laura reached her desk just as the phone rang. Who on earth would be calling her at this time of morning? Alarmed, she picked up the receiver.
“Good morning, this is Shelley Hacker from The Morning News Hour. I’m calling to speak to Nikolas Spiros.”
“I’m afraid you have a wrong number.” Laura hung up fast, not giving the reporter time to ask any follow-up questions.
The phone rang again. Oh, Lord. She glanced at the caller ID: unknown caller. She picked the receiver up an inch and set it back down. The feeding frenzy had begun.
“What’s going on?”
Laura whirled to face Nick. “You tell me. The phone’s ringing off the hook with reporters wanting to speak with Nikolas Spiros.”
Beneath his olive complexion, Nick went a sickly shade of gray. He gritted out, “I’m Nick Cass.”
“You are now. I get that. But were you this Spiros guy at some point in your past?”
“My past is dead.”
She gritted her teeth. This was about her and the children as much as it was about him, darn it. She had a family to protect. “I understand your desire to move on. To start a new life. I really do. I support you all the way. But if you were Nikolas Spiros before, you’re going to have to deal with him sometime. What are you going to tell the media?”
“I’ll tell them nothing. It’s none of their business.”
A new hardness, or maybe an old hardness for all she knew, clung to Nick. This was not the gentle, laid-back man she’d spent the past year with. This man resembled much more a savvy, tough businessman who might run a billion-dollar shipping empire. Did she know him at all?
The phone rang again. She glanced at the caller ID and stopped herself at the last second from hanging it up. “It’s Tatum Carter. Your lawyer wants to talk to you … Nikolas.”
Nick sighed and held a hand out for the receiver.
“What the hell’s going on, Nick?”
“Tatum. Good morning. I gather you’ve seen the news?” Nick asked evenly.
“What’s this about you being some Greek billionaire? Hell, you owned AbaCo Shipping until a few years ago. What have you gotten me into?”
Ahh, the ass-covering had commenced. Nick sighed. “If you want to remove yourself from this case, I won’t stop you.”
“No, no,” Tatum quickly replied. “I just want to know what’s going on.”
Nick rolled his eyes. Greed won out, then. He took a certain comfort in knowing what made the attorney tick. And then he jolted as he realized his old, sharklike business instincts were roaring back to the fore. He didn’t want to return to this part of his life, this part of himself.
He glanced up and caught Laura staring at him in equal parts dismay and horror. He was losing her. As sure as he was standing here, she was pulling away from him—from the stranger he’d become. “I’ll call you later, Tatum.”
He hung up on the man without any further ado and sat down beside Laura on the sofa. “I lied to you in Paris.”
“I already figured that out,” she replied dryly. “Why?”
No way was he going to tell her all the things William Ward had revealed to him. There was still a chance he could keep her and the kids out of his past, and he was going to do his darnedest to make that happen. The private investigator had found nothing on any Nick Cass. So far it appeared such a man had never existed. If that held true, his new family was in the clear.
He shrugged. “I apparently created an alter ego for myself. An identity under which I could travel anonymously and unobtrusively. Nick Cass could go into a coffee shop or sit at a café and no one paid any attention to him.”
“Who were you hiding from?” Laura asked shrewdly.
“The media, I imagine. My employees, maybe. Hell, maybe an ex-lover.” He added candidly, “And myself, if I had to guess.”
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
“I expect you fell for Nick Cass, the regular guy, not some Greek billionaire. Knowing you and loving you the way I do now, I’ll bet I wasn’t about to risk what I had with you.”
“So you lied to me? You trusted me so little? Didn’t you think I would understand? Am I that judgmental or just that stupid?”
She didn’t raise her voice, but the anger in it was unmistakable.
“I’m sorry, Laura. I don’t remember any of it. I have no answers for you. Undoubtedly, I was wrong and should have told you everything from the start.”
She threw up her hands. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to be this furious with you and not be able to be mad at you because you can’t remember doing any of it?”
He smiled sadly. “I really am sorry.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Deal with the fallout as best as I can, and when the excitement blows over, go back to being plain old Nick Cass, the man who loves you and our kids.”
“What fallout should I expect from this revelation?”
He grimaced but forced himself to look her squarely in the eye. “I honestly don’t know. But I can tell you this. I plan to do everything in my power to keep you and the kids out of this.”
“This what?”
She was too smart for her own good, sometimes. She’d heard the evasion in his voice and put her finger exactly on the source of his discomfort. “I’ve had a gut feeling since the moment you fished me out of that box that I should let sleeping dogs lie. I feel that way more strongly than ever. It’s nothing concrete. Just a feeling.”
He reached out and took her icy hands in his. “I don’t know what’s hidden in those lost five years, I swear. But I think it’s bad, and I think it could put you and the children in danger. You’ve got to let me deal with this alone. Stay away from it, Laura.”
She stared at him, her dark gaze brimming with frustration. “No way—”
He cut her off gently. “I have to know the children are safe. You have to take care of them for me—for us—while I put my past to rest.”
Ellie must’ve sensed her mother’s tension for the infant started to fuss. He was a cad to be so relieved at being saved by a baby’s distress. Ellie, uncharacteristically, wanted no part of being soothed. Her fussing escalated to crying outright and soon to screaming. Not appreciating mommy’s stress, apparently.
Laura spared him a look that promised this conversation was not over as she left to find Lisbet.
The phone rang again. He glanced at the caller ID and jolted. William Ward. How had his former attorney found this phone number, and furthermore, why on earth was he calling it? Nick picked up the receiver quickly lest Laura take the call.
“Good morning, William.”
“Nikolas. We need to talk.”
“Then speak.”
“This is confidential. Needs to be face-to-face.”
Nick sighed. “In case you haven’t seen the news this morning, I’m a little busy at the moment.” Not to mention he had serious damage control to do with Laura. He knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t about to let him deal with this mess on his own.
The lawyer huffed and then said heavily, “I’ve been doing some digging about you. I’ve found something. It’s bad.”
Nick froze. “What is it?”
“I’m at my beach house on the Cape. Get here as fast as you can.”
“I can’t just drop everything here and come see you!” Nick exploded. “The AbaCo trial is about to begin. And furthermore, my old life is over. Finished. I’m not that person anymore.”
“Based on what’s sitting on my desk in front of me, your old life is about to come after you whether you like it or not.”
“I won’t let my past touch my new life,” Nick bit out sharply. He turned to pace and stopped in his tracks. Laura. She was standing in the doorway, the color draining from her face as he watched.
“I’ve got to go,” Nick snapped.
William said forcefully, “I’m not kidding. You need to come up here—”
He hung up on the lawyer.
“What’s up?” Laura asked. Her cool voice sounded brittle, like she was barely hanging on to self-control.
“My past,” he bit out. “I don’t know.” He shoved a frustrated hand through his hair. “I don’t remember any of it.”
“You knew your real name. It would’ve taken you two minutes on the internet to find out all about yourself, and maybe even what’s got you all freaked out.”
How was he supposed to explain his dead certainty that he had to leave his past alone? To stay far, far away from anything having to do with Nikolas Spiros? It would sound like a lame excuse to her. Hell, maybe it was a lame excuse.
Laura’s voice fell, dropping into a hurt hush that was a hundred times more painful than if she’d yelled at him. “I thought you loved me.”
He didn’t try to stop her as she whirled and ran from the room. He’d been worse than a fool to avoid his past, and she was right to be furious with him. Every accusation she’d thrown at him was less awful than the ones he was flinging at himself right now. It didn’t even make things better that he was dying inside. She was everything to him, and he’d hurt her terribly. He’d rather endure torture than cause her an ounce of pain. But he’d pretty well blown that. He’d blown everything.
Now what was he supposed to do? How was he ever going to make this better?
Swearing long and hard at himself, he headed upstairs to Adam’s room. The child was still asleep, which was just as well. He didn’t think he’d have the strength to say goodbye to his son if Adam were awake. Stroking the dark, silky hair so like his own gently, he murmured, “I love you more than life. Never doubt that. Take care of your mother for me. And be brave.”
He turned and left quickly before he could weaken. He had to protect them all. No matter the cost to himself. Feeling every bit of the past six years in his bones, an ache that had never quite gone away, he headed downstairs. Laura and the kids had kept it at bay with their love and laughter, but all of a sudden, the withheld agony was back.
“Are you going out, Mr. Cass?” Marta asked in surprise. “Breakfast will be ready soon.”
He rasped, “I won’t be taking breakfast today. And you’d better send Laura’s up to her office. I suspect she’s going to be busy in there for a while.”
By noon, with her connections she’d probably know more about Nick Cass than he did. And she would definitely know everything there was to know about Nikolas Spiros. Every last ugly, selfish, tawdry detail.
He’d lost her. The lies had finally caught up with him. But, Lord, the cost of it. His eyes hot and his throat painfully tight, he stepped out of the house and drove away from the best things that had ever happened to him. He’d ruined it all. Everything that was good and right about his life retreated in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of the estate. If it was the last thing he ever did, he’d make this mess right. Put his family back together.
He thought he’d known hell before in a box. Hah! That had been a walk in a park compared to the hell embracing him now. A hell of his own making.
* * *
Laura was hanging on by a thread. The phone wouldn’t quit ringing, and she was developing a horrendous headache. How on earth had she never connected Nick to Nikolas Spiros? She should have recognized him in Paris, and sometime in the past year she definitely should have searched for disappearances of men matching Nick’s description six years ago. But no. He hadn’t wanted to know, and she’d gone along with his plan to bury their heads in the sand and avoid facing whatever demons lurked in his past. She’d willfully ignored the signs that Nick was not what he appeared to be, had been so caught up in her own selfish bliss that she hadn’t asked any of the obvious questions.
Why didn’t he have any other family or friends he wanted to let know he was alive and free? Why was he so at ease living in the luxurious world she inhabited? Why did he flatly refuse to talk about his past prior to his memory loss? And the granddaddy of them all—why was he kidnapped and thrown into a box for five years? Who were his enemies, and why did they bear him so much malice that they chose to make him suffer rather than simply kill him?
At lunchtime, Lisbet apologetically poked her head into Laura’s office. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but Adam is hysterical and really needs to be with you. I’ve tried everything I know to calm him, but he’s panicked that something bad has happened to you and his father. Nothing will do but for him to see you.”
Laura stood up quickly. The needs of her children would always come first over her work … even if that work was investigating their father. She hurried to the playroom, where Adam was curled up in a sobbing ball in the corner, hugging the stuffed elephant that had been his special toy forever.
Laura stroked his back gently. “Hey, kiddo. What’s the matter?”
The child flung himself at her, wrapping his arms around her neck and squeezing her tightly enough that it was a little hard to breathe. Not that she complained. She hugged his shaking body. “Everything’s okay,” she soothed him, rocking back and forth.
“Daddy’s gone, and the bad man got him!”
“Daddy’s not gone. And the bad man definitely didn’t get him,” Laura declared.
Lisbet cleared her throat. “Begging your pardon, but Mr. Cass left the house before breakfast.”
Laura’s entire being clenched in shock. He’d left? Where had he gone? And for how long? She shoved back her panic, focusing for the moment on her son. “Adam, Daddy has some business to take care of. It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not. He told me to take care of you for him. And to be brave. He wouldn’t say that if he was coming back. He went to fight the bad man.”
“Well, honey, even if he did, Daddy will win. It’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t!” Adam wailed.
“Do you need me to go help Daddy?”
Adam lifted his red, wet gaze to hers. “Can you do that?”
“Sure. I’m pretty ferocious, you know.”
“Daddy says you’re like a mama bear with cubs,” Adam replied dryly, his humor already so much like his father’s.
A burning knife twisted in her gut. She replied stoutly, “He’s right. Grrrr.”
Adam smiled reluctantly. But he wasn’t about to be diverted so easily. “You won’t let the bad man get you, too?”
“Never.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. Cross my heart, hope to die, alligator in my eye.”
“Alligator in your—” Adam giggled. “That’s silly.”
“Made you laugh, didn’t it?”
“Yes.” He waxed thoughtful once more. Impossible to distract, he was. Just like both of his parents on that score. “Where do you think the bad man is?”
“Hmm. I don’t know. But I’m really, really good at finding people. I found Daddy before, didn’t I? I’ll find the bad man, and I’ll find Daddy, again. I’d never let anything happen to anyone in our family. I’m a mama bear, and you and Ellie are my cubs. Don’t you ever forget that, okay?”
Adam nodded against her neck.
She closed her eyes and prayed for strength. She had to find Nick. Figure out what had gone so wrong so fast. And somehow, some way, put it right. Her children needed their father.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_27d82fb5-8b38-5c06-87dc-c166d91c270e)
Laura was startled when Marta announced that Tatum Carter was at the house and waiting in the library to speak with her. Since when did lawyers make house calls? He must be panicked over Nick’s abrupt disappearance yesterday. Join the club.
She left her computer, which had been giving up a treasure trove of information on one Nikolas Spiros, and walked down the hall to the library. “Tatum. This is a pleasant surprise. What can I do for you today?”
“Tell me where Nick is. The feds are going to have my head on a platter if I lose their star witness for them. The trial starts next week.”
She replied quietly, “If I knew where he was, do you think I’d be standing here talking to you?”
“What the hell’s going on with him, Laura?”
She sighed. “I think we all underestimated the trauma he’s suffering from. And I think we all ignored the possible problems his memory loss could be concealing.”
“What’s your gut feel about him? Is he stable enough to put on a witness stand? If AbaCo skates on this kidnapping charge, it’ll be like letting Al Capone get off on the tax evasion charges that finally landed him in jail where he belonged.”
She wasn’t concerned about Nick’s stability as much as she was about the state of his heart. Had he already abandoned her and the kids and returned to his old life? Goodness knew, Nikolas Spiros had lived a life of glamorous excess that went well beyond even her wealth to provide.
She spoke with a conviction she was far from feeling. “If Nick goes on the witness stand, he’ll do what he has to do to put away his captors.” Even if it messes up his personal life? Costs him the Spiros fortune? She’d like to think he was that honorable, but at this point, she had no way of knowing.
“Where is he, Laura? What’s your best guess?”
“My best guess—” her best hope “—is that he’s gone away to deal with the fallout of his past and that he’ll be back when it’s resolved.”
“How long is that going to take? He’s got about a week to get his ducks in line.”
She shrugged. If only Nick had confided in her. Had let her help him. She had enormous resources, official and unofficial, at her fingertips with which to help him. She understood his impulse to protect her and the kids, to keep his new life far away from his old one. But she was still as frustrated as all get out at her current helplessness. If only she knew where he was!
“Tatum, if you were a wealthy man who’s been out of touch with his life for a while, where would you go to pick up the threads?”
“Easy. My stock broker and my lawyer.”
She nodded. “How do I go about finding out who Nick’s—Nikolas’s—personal attorney was six years ago?”
Tatum frowned. “Client lists are confidential. But I could make a few phone calls. Maybe find out something off the record. Where was Nick living prior to his kidnapping?”
“His shipping empire was headquartered in Athens and had offices all around the world.” Including Paris. “His North American headquarters was in Boston.”
Tatum called an attorney buddy of his from law school who practiced in Boston. That guy didn’t know anything, but referred Tatum to someone else. As the lawyer placed a second call, she reflected on the enormous power of good-old-boy networks.
The second lawyer knew something. She could tell by the way Tatum’s face lit up as he listened intently.
“Ward, MacIntosh and Howe,” Tatum announced as he disconnected the call. “Want me to contact them and see if Nick’s been in their offices recently?”
“Sure.”
If Nick had been to visit his lawyer, he might still be in the Boston area. During his incarceration, his shipping company had been sold out from under him, and he might very well be trying to reverse that sale. If not that, Nick was probably getting funds released into his hands to finance whatever he planned to do next. She had an alert set on their joint bank accounts to notify her the second Nick accessed any of them, but so far, he hadn’t. He was welcome to whatever he needed or wanted from her accounts.
Funny how love and family made something like money seem so trivial. Not that she’d ever been that hung up on wealth. She just wanted to have enough to do what she wanted to without having to worry about it. Case in point: It had been handy over the past five years to finance her own investigations as she helped women find the fathers of their children. Most of her clients had been in desperate financial straits and couldn’t have paid her a dime even if they’d known who she was.
Tatum was on hold with Nick’s law firm and muttering to himself as he waited. “… fly up to Boston and try to contact him before the federal prosecutors get wind of the fact that he’s fled.”
“I don’t think he’s fled,” she responded. “I think he’s taking care of personal business.”
“Yeah, well, he’d better take care of it fast—” He broke off and spoke into the phone. “This is Tatum Carter of Carter and Associates in Fairfax, Virginia. I represent Nick Cass—Nikolas Spiros—in an upcoming trial against the people who allegedly kidnapped him. I need to speak with Nick’s attorney at your firm.”
Laura frowned as Carter visibly paled.
“I’m so sorry,” he stammered. “I’ll be in touch in a few days. Of course. My sympathies.”
Alarmed, Laura blurted the second he hung up, “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Nick’s lawyer is dead. Someone broke into the guy’s house last night. The police think William Ward startled the intruder and was murdered.”
Warning bells clanged wildly in Laura’s head. Home robbery, her foot. What were the odds that someone randomly broke into the lawyer’s house the day after his kidnapped billionaire client surfaced? Ohmigosh. Nick. How much danger was he in? Her gut yelled that he was the prime target on the hit list.
“I have to go, Carter. I’ll be in touch.” She raced out of the room and upstairs to pack. Somewhere in the next ten frantic minutes, she ordered up an emergency corporate jet to fly her to Boston ASAP.
Ellie squawked over the baby monitor, startling Laura out of her panicked packing. The baby. What was she going to do about her daughter? The infant nursed exclusively, and after her recent bout of jaundice, Laura was loathe to shift Ellie over to formula. She didn’t have enough pumped milk in the freezer to be gone for several days.
Laura closed her eyes in frustration. Mother or frantic lover? How was she supposed to choose between the two? With a sigh, she headed for the nursery to feed the baby. Afterward, she quickly packed a bag for Ellie as well.
She popped into the playroom to say goodbye to Adam. “Hey, kiddo.”
He flung himself at her and she laughed as he planted a sticky kiss on her cheek. “I’m off to go rescue Daddy. Call me whenever you want to, okay?”
Adam nodded against her neck. “Promise you’ll save Daddy from the bad man.”
“You’ve got it. I promise. Daddy and I will be home in no time. You and Lisbet have fun while I’m gone and don’t eat anything healthy, okay?”
Adam laughed. They both knew his health-freak nanny would never dream of letting Adam exist on junk food.
“I love you, Adam.”
“Love you, too, Mommy.”
Her heart ached at having to leave her precious son for even a few days. She nodded at Lisbet over Adam’s dark head, and the nanny smiled and nodded back. Lisbet knew full well how deeply Laura treasured her children and would take care of Adam like her own son in Laura’s absence.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. No more than, say, three days.”
“Yes, ma’am. Have a safe trip.”
Before she could dissolve into completely un-superhero-like tears in front of her son, Laura spun and left the playroom, giving a theatric leap as she passed through the doorway. “Super Mommy away!” she called out.
The last sound she heard as she scooped up Ellie and headed out was Adam shouting, “Go, Super Mommy!”
The drive to the airport and subsequent flight to Boston took several hours. It was late afternoon when Laura and Ellie arrived at Logan Airport. The baby traveled like a champ. She must take after her mother when it came to enjoying adventure and new experiences.
A newspaper purchased in the airport terminal told Laura that William Ward had been at his home on Cape Cod when he was killed. She plugged the town into her rental car’s GPS and in a few minutes was crawling down I-93 in the remnants of the day’s rush-hour traffic. Big Dig or no Big Dig, traffic in Boston was horrendous.
It was nearly 10:00 p.m. when she finally found Ward’s house just outside Hyannisport. In full spy mode, she turned off her headlights and drove past. It was impossible to miss with yellow crime scene tape stretched all around it. She turned down the first side road and parked parallel to Ward’s house. Time to go cross-country. Although how Super Mommy was supposed to pull that off with a baby in tow, she wasn’t sure.
She donned a baby backpack and settled Ellie into a nest of blankets within it. The baby had just dined and was ready for a nice warm nap. Thankfully, as Laura set out hiking toward the Ward house, the motion seemed to soothe her daughter.
Ward was not a criminal lawyer, which eliminated some disgruntled client or victim of one of his clients being the killer. It had to be Nick who triggered the attack. What information could Ward have on Nikolas Spiros that was worth killing for? Laura had no idea what it could be, but she’d bet Nick had a good idea what it was. Or if Nick didn’t know what it was, he’d darn well be dying of curiosity to know. And in either case, she figured Nick planned to find out what information Ward had been murdered over.
A clearing came into sight ahead. Assuming she hadn’t lost all of her CIA field skills, that would be the backyard of the Ward house. Hopefully, Nick would be paying this place a visit soon. And if she was lucky, she just might spot him and hook up with him. At least that was the plan. It was admittedly a sketchy plan, but better than having no plan at all. Given that Nick hadn’t used any of his credit cards and still had not withdrawn any funds from their checking accounts, she could only assume he was using cash and an assumed name. It was what she’d do in the same situation. And Nick was nothing if not highly intelligent.
She cursed under her breath as a branch whapped her in the face, showering her with wet, cold dew. She hadn’t snuck around in the woods for years, and she abruptly remembered why she’d never liked this sort of work. She’d always been more at ease in urban environments and had gravitated to assignments in major metropolitan areas. Like Paris.
Ellie made an unhappy noise as some of the cold dew sprinkled her. Laura reached awkwardly to pat her. “Hush, sweetie. Mommy’s trying to be sneaky.”
Although how on God’s green earth she was going to pull that off with an infant in tow, she had no idea. It was pure insanity to try it. But for now, Ellie was stuck in the woods playing spy with Mommy.
Laura pushed forward a few more yards and the baby bag caught on a bush. Of course, it spilled. Swearing under her breath, she crouched and picked up miscellaneous baby gear and stuffed it all back in the bag.
She rose to her feet and continued forward.
If William Ward’s killers had broken into his house to kill him instead of in a simple mugging or drive-by shooting, that meant his killers also had orders to search for something. Something in this house.
She stopped in the shadow of a huge tree as Ward’s “cottage” came into view. The house had to have at least five bedrooms, if not more. If that was a cottage, then it was a cottage on serious steroids. The sound and smell of the ocean were unmistakable as Laura reached the edge of the woods crowding the rear of the structure. No wonder the killers had gotten away last night. This forest made for a perfect escape route.
She hunkered down to wait for someone to show up and prayed it would be Nick and not the killers coming back to finish their search. Time passed, and Ellie snoozed happily at her back. The baby was like having her own personal heater snuggled up against her. Laura’s legs got stiff, and she moved through the trees until she could see the front of the house. The front porch was brick with tall white pillars and looked strangely out of place on the otherwise Craftsman-style home.
“How tacky,” she muttered to Ellie.
Ellie stirred long enough to burble her disapproval of the architectural faux pas as headlights came into view on the road in front of the house. Laura plastered herself against a tree trunk as a sedan pulled up in front of the house. A tall form unfolded from the driver’s seat and Laura gasped in spite of herself. He might be wearing a gray wig and be hunching over as if he were decades older, but there was no mistaking Nick.
His head came up sharply, almost as if he’d heard her. But surely that wasn’t possible over the roar of the ocean behind him. She didn’t put it past him to sense her presence, however. In her experience, people often became incredibly intuitive in high-threat situations. And there was no denying that the connection between them had always been electric.
She watched tensely as Nick approached the house. He had the good sense to walk around the house and approach it from the back, out of sight of the road. She drifted along beside him, maintaining her cover in the trees. How was he going to get in? As far as she knew, he had no particular skills in breaking and entering. She was startled when he merely stepped up to the alarm pad by the back door and entered a series of numbers. He reached for the back door and slipped inside.
Her spy within was indignant at how easily he’d gained entrance. She’d have been forced to go through a lengthy and difficult process to bypass the security system and pick the door lock. But the woman within who worried about Nick was incredibly relieved that he was safely inside.
She was just stepping clear of the woods when a quiet sound in the dark threw Laura onto full battle alert. It was a car. Coming down the road with its headlights off. Nobody with honest intentions drove around on a cloudy night on an isolated road like this with no lights. Crud. She had to let Nick know he was about to have company. She eyed the open expanse of lawn between her and the house warily.
If she was going to go, it had to be right now before the darkened car turned into the drive. She took off running as fast as she could. God bless her personal trainer for the misery he’d put her through this past month. She wasn’t in the best shape of her entire life, but at least she wasn’t a complete marshmallow.
She darted onto the back porch as Ellie roused, complaining about being jostled around so hard in the baby carrier.
“It’s okay, sweetie. Go back to sleep,” Laura soothed as she pushed open the already partially ajar door. She closed it behind her and somewhere nearby, the house’s security system beeped, reactivating.
She slipped into the deep shadows of a coat room and then into a kitchen. She had to hurry. The bad guys would be here in a minute or so. “Nick!” she called out. She moved into a long hallway that led toward the front of the house. “Nick!”
He emerged from what looked like an office, looking thunderstruck. “Laura? What are you doing here?”
“Later,” she bit out. “We’re about to have company. The kind with guns.”
Nick darted to a window to look outside. “I don’t see anyone.”
“They’ve pulled around back, then. Can we open the front door without setting off the alarm system?” she asked urgently.
“Who cares? Let’s set it off. The police will be here in a few minutes and it’ll chase off these bastards in the meantime.”
She nodded and they stepped forward. That was when he spotted Ellie.
“You brought the baby with you?” he exclaimed incredulously.
“I’m a nursing mother, and I wasn’t exactly expecting armed men to threaten us,” she snapped. “Let’s go. They’ll be inside any second.”
Nick nodded.
She nodded back and he opened the front door. A piercing alarm screeched deafeningly as they raced across the front porch. Ellie lurched against Laura’s back and immediately commenced screaming at the top of her lungs. It was that special, baby-in-mortal-danger wail that absolutely demanded an instant response, and it was all Laura could do to keep running across the front yard toward Nick’s car and not stop to comfort her.
A bang behind her and a simultaneous metallic ping in front of her did get an immediate reaction out of Laura, however. Someone was shooting at them! Ducking instinctively, she looked over her shoulder. A dark figure was coming around the corner of the house.
Out of her peripheral vision, she caught sight of a second figure coming around the other side of the house. Plus a third man entering the house … she swore mentally. She and Nick were outnumbered, which meant they were also outgunned.
The two men advanced cautiously, not shooting any more after that first volley of shots aimed at Nick’s car. Then it hit her. The shooters must have disabled the vehicle so she and Nick couldn’t escape. Which meant they wanted to capture Nick.
No! Not again! He couldn’t disappear again. This time it would undoubtedly be for good. They’d capture him over her dead body. Super Mommy roared to the fore, and Laura fumbled frantically in the baby bag banging around at her side as she ran after Nick.
“Your car’s dead,” she panted. “Mine’s that way.”
He veered in the direction she pointed and sprinted for the woods with her on his heels.
Her fingers frantically identified objects inside the baby bag. Bottle. Diaper ointment. Pacifier. Dammit, where was her gun? Finally, she felt its cold weight and yanked it clear of the fabric bag. She and Nick gained the edge of the woods and slowed down to navigate the heavy underbrush. Thankfully, Ellie had fallen mostly silent. Nick held back a jumble of vines for her and she slipped past him. She turned to face their pursuers. The pair of men were advancing slowly, now, weapons held out in front of them in grips that looked entirely too competent for Laura’s comfort.
“My car’s through the woods,” she whispered urgently. “That way.”
Nick whispered back, “You go first. I’ll go behind you. That way if they shoot at us they’ll hit me and not Ellie.”
“Take my pistol.”
He reached under his coat. “I have one. Keep yours.”
Where in the heck had he gotten a hold of a gun? Did he even know how to use the thing? She eyed him in dismay but was relieved to see him holding it in a reasonable grip. They might just get out of this alive, after all. If they could keep Ellie quiet so she wouldn’t give their position away.
Nick moved close as they crept forward cautiously. He crooned to Ellie, “Hush, sweetheart. Be an angel for Daddy.”
How he could be so cool with armed men chasing them, she had no idea. Shockingly, his calm tone seemed to mollify the baby and she quieted completely.
“That’s my brave girl,” Nick continued to murmur.
Laura looked back over her shoulder. The pair of men had been joined by a third and they were moving cautiously in this direction. She and Nick needed a diversion. Something dramatic. She dug around in the baby bag until she felt the steel cylinder of a silencer. She screwed it onto her weapon, assumed a shooter’s stance, took careful aim and fired at the gaudy chandelier on the front porch. It exploded spectacularly, glass shattering in all directions, and the three men ducked at the abrupt noise behind them.
Laura sprinted like a madwoman through the woods with Nick panting right on her heels as they dodged left and right around trees. Shots rang out behind them. Thankfully, in the real world, most people couldn’t hit the broad side of the barn when they were running themselves and aiming at another fast-moving target.
Bark flew nearby. Uh-oh. It didn’t look like their pursuers were shooting to take out tires anymore. That looked like a shot aimed to kill.
Waaaaaah! Ellie let out a renewed scream.
Laura fumbled through the contents of the bag desperately, as she ran, seeking the familiar shape of the pacifier. Ammo clip. Bottle. Diapers. No pacifier!
Bingo. A soft rubber nipple. Laura yanked it out as she ducked under a low branch. She stumbled as her foot slid off a half-rotted log buried in the leaves, staggered left and barely managed to right herself. But she’d dropped the all-important pacifier. She paused a precious second to look around. Thank God. White plastic caught her eye. Laura pounced on it and took off running once more.
The men behind them were close enough for her to hear their heavy breathing. At this range, they might actually hit a moving target. She put on a terrified burst of speed, zigzagging like a rabbit fleeing for its life.
Ellie’s screaming took on a rhythmic quality as the baby was jostled by Laura’s steps. No way were they going to escape their pursuers until the child quit giving away their position like this. They needed to turn this into a stealth exercise.
More gunshots rang out behind them. Nick swore behind Laura. “Hurry,” he grunted. “That was close.”
Desperate, she wiped the pacifier on her shirt and stabbed backward over her shoulder. She was so going to mommy hell already for putting her child in the line of fire, she supposed giving her a dirty pacifier wouldn’t make matters much worse. But what choice did she have? It was that or die.
Miraculously, she hit Ellie’s mouth, and even more miraculously, the infant took the pacifier, sucking it angrily. Laura slowed, ducking into an area of thick brush. Nick followed closely, helping her lift brambles aside as they crept forward. Male voices called back and forth behind them. Apparently, their pursuers had lost sight of them. Hallelujah.
She pointed off to their left in the direction she thought the car was, assuming she wasn’t completely disoriented out here in the pitch-black night and bewildering tangle of trees and undergrowth, and Nick veered that direction.
They burst out of the trees as a dirt road opened up before them. “This way,” she gasped. The car’s blessed bulk came into sight and she nearly sobbed in relief. Nick hung back a little, still protecting Ellie with his body as Laura used the last of her strength to tear toward the vehicle.
“I’ll drive,” Nick called out low behind her.
Like any good field operative, she’d left the doors unlocked and the key fob inside the vehicle. She dived for the passenger door and flung herself inside awkwardly, half-lying across the front seat so she wouldn’t crush Ellie, while Nick leaped into the driver’s seat and punched the ignition button. He wasted no time throwing the vehicle into gear and stomping on the gas. The car jumped forward.
Shots behind them announced that the bad guys had reached the road. The car squealed around a curve and the shooting behind them stopped.
“They’ll follow us,” Nick announced.
“Then drive like a bat out of hell,” she panted back.
While he commenced doing just that, she wriggled out of the backpack and half-climbed over the backseat to strap Ellie, red-faced and furious, into her car seat. Laura wiped the pacifier off as best she could, and offered it to the baby once more. Yup. Mommy hell for her. But sometimes a mommy had to do what a mommy had to do. And given that they were careening along a twisting dirt road at something like seventy miles per hour, she wasn’t about to unstrap the infant and try to nurse her.
Nick muttered, white knuckled, “Mother of God, Laura, what are you doing here with Ellie?”
“Saving your life, apparently. Where did you learn to drive like this?”
“I’m told I did some Formula One racing in my previous life.”
“Had a death wish, did you?”
“Something like that.”
“Have you got more ammunition?” he asked.
Right. Because every prepared mommy hauled around extra ammunition along with spare diapers and a change of clothes for baby. She dug into the bottom of the baby bag for spare clips. She came up with two full fourteen-shot clips and counted back fast to the firefight in her head. “I’ve got nine shots in my weapon now and twenty-eight more here.”
He nodded tersely. “I’ve got five shots left. I don’t have spare clips. It was all I could do to buy an unregistered gun without getting arrested, let alone acquiring extra clips for it.”
Ellie was finally subsiding. Laura smiled at the vigorous sucking noises coming from the car seat. It was good to know her daughter had spunk when provoked.
“Where does this road go?” Nick asked.
“I have no idea. There’s not a straight road on the entire Cape. My suggestion is we keep driving until we get to some road the GPS recognizes.”
He nodded tersely. “How did you find me?”
“Carter Tatum found out William Ward was your attorney. When we discovered he’d been killed, I figured it couldn’t be a coincidence. Clearly, he had something the people out to get you want. Which meant you were bound to come looking for it, too. So, I staked out Ward’s house and waited for you to show up.”
“You know me too well.”
She shrugged. “Lucky guess.”
Nick smiled wryly. “Luck had nothing to do with it. I always knew you were brilliant.”
“Are you going to let me use that brilliance to help you, now?”
He sighed. “I wanted to keep you out of this. I knew it could get dangerous, and I didn’t want you or the kids to get hurt.”
She winced at the faint note of reproach in his voice. He was right. She’d been an idiot to put Ellie in danger. But she’d only expected a nice, quiet stake-out. As soon as they were safe, she’d make other arrangements for the baby.
“I appreciate the sentiment, Nick, but it’s time to let me help you. I’m good at this sort of thing, and I want my children’s father alive.” She carefully avoided adding that she wanted her lover alive, too. She had no idea whether or not he planned to remain with her now that his true identity was out in the open.
The dirt road abruptly intersected a paved road. Nick turned west and in a moment the GPS popped up a road map. They followed the residential street for a mile or so and turned onto a larger road. As Nick accelerated into the desultory traffic, she watched carefully in the rearview mirror for any sign of followers. No lights or cars were hanging behind them acting like tails.
They’d made it.
Her hands started to shake, and then her whole body got into the act. Nick glanced over at her in concern. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“No, I’m not okay. Would you care to tell me why those men just tried to kidnap you again?”
Nick frowned. “It looked to me like they were trying to kill us.”
She shook her head in the negative. “They didn’t shoot at you when you were running across the lawn. They only fired at your car. They didn’t want you to leave, but they didn’t want you dead. In the woods, only a few of the shots came anywhere near us, and I think those were mistakes. They were trying to scare us into surrendering but definitely weren’t trying to kill you. Which means someone wants you alive. I can only infer that means someone wants something from you.”
Her declaration put a heavy frown on Nick’s handsome features.
She continued, “Why weren’t you killed six years ago? Why the elaborate kidnapping instead? I’ll bet that’s the same reason those men weren’t trying to kill you tonight.” Lord, it felt good to finally ask the question. “What’s going on, Nick?”
Chapter 7 (#ulink_b1bb7596-68d3-5ec5-a370-bd5f27018afb)
Nick sighed. Laura, of all people, deserved answers. Answers he was far from having, however. “I truly don’t remember anything of those five years. I swear,” he stated.
Laura nodded and crossed her arms expectantly, announcing silently that she wasn’t going to back off this time. Her child had just been put in mortal danger, and she was at the end of her prodigious patience. Not that he blamed her. He just hoped she’d forgive him when she heard the entire, sordid tale. Although, it wasn’t like he forgave himself.
He picked up the story reluctantly. “That trip I took a few days ago was to Boston to pay a visit to my old attorney, William Ward. It turned out he was able to fill in some pertinent details of the two years prior to my kidnapping.”
When Laura opened her mouth to ask about it, he raised a hand gently for her to let him continue. She nodded and subsided.
“I’ll fill you in on that in a minute. The morning after my face got splashed all over the news, William called me. He said he had important information to show me. He insisted I come up to his house on the Cape immediately.”
“What was it?” Laura blurted.
“I don’t know.”
Her hopeful expression fell.
“But when we get somewhere safe, I have a flash drive in my pocket that I took from the secret drawer in William’s desk. I’m hoping it’ll give us some answers.”
“How did you know about his house’s security code, not to mention this secret drawer?”
He made a face. “William was practically a second father to me. I spent a lot of time with him and his wife on the cape. He represented me when I turned eighteen and took over Spiros Shipping. He’s been my attorney ever since.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
“I have no idea.”
Laura mulled things over, and Nick let her. In his experience, she was eminently reasonable when left to her own devices to figure a thing out. He only prayed that reason led her to accept his words as truth.
They were off the Cape and approaching Boston proper before she finally asked soberly, “Why do you think someone killed your lawyer?”
“I can think of about a billion reasons,” he answered grimly.
She nodded in agreement. “I’ve been reading on the internet about the sale of Spiros Shipping after you dropped out of sight. I’m assuming someone faked your permission and sold it out from under you?”
“I don’t know if they coerced me into signing something or just forged my signature. I can’t imagine ever giving anyone permission to sell the family business.”
“Who hated you enough to steal your business?”
He briefly considered pulling off the road to address her question but decided she’d be less likely to attack him if he were at the wheel of a moving car with her and Ellie in it. He answered carefully, “When you arrived at William Ward’s house, I was browsing through the most recent documents on his computer.”
“And?” she prompted cautiously.
“And it turns out that shortly before I met you in Paris, I took a secret trip to Las Vegas.” Laura went still. She must see it coming. He continued grimly, “I wasn’t alone on that trip. It turns out I was secretly married there to a woman named Meredith Black.” The name felt strange on his tongue. Vaguely unpleasant, like the remembered taste of bitter medicine.
If Laura had been still before, she went statuelike now. Alarmed, he alternated between glancing over at her and keeping an eye on the highway.
Finally, he couldn’t stand the suspense of her complete nonreaction any longer. “Talk to me,” he urged.
“What do you want me to say?” Laura’s voice was hollow. Hoarse. Unlike how he’d ever heard it before. Guilt and self-loathing consumed him. He’d caused the woman he loved this pain.
He spoke in a rush. “I swear. I have no recollection of her whatsoever. I don’t know why I married her, and I surely don’t know why I got involved with you in Paris so soon afterward. I can only assume the marriage was an impulsive thing and didn’t work out. Maybe I was drunk and it was all a big joke.”
“A joke?” Laura choked out.
“A really, really bad one?” he offered. Based on the thunderous frown settling on her brow, Laura clearly failed to see the humor. He didn’t blame her.
He drove in silence while guilt and misery ate at his gut from the inside out. It was his worst nightmare come true. Something—someone—out of his past had the power to destroy everything he and Laura had built between them, including their happy little family. He’d contact this Meredith Black woman and get a divorce. The woman could have whatever financial resources had been left to Nikolas Spiros. He’d make it all better.
But then Laura asked, “Why hasn’t she come forward or contacted you now that your face is being splashed all over the news?”
“Maybe she hasn’t heard about me.”
Laura snorted. “You’re an international sensation. The playboy billionaire back from a mysterious, six-year absence. She’d have to be living in a cave not to have heard about you.”
He frowned. Laura was right. Why hadn’t this Meredith person contacted him? Or had she? Was she the urgent reason William Ward had insisted on him coming to the Cape to discuss?
“Did she have control of your financial assets while you were gone?” Laura asked.
“I don’t know. Possibly.”
“Then your return would throw a serious monkey wrench into her life. You’d be a massive problem for her.”
He laughed with scant humor. “Gee. Thanks.”
“Sorry. Just trying to think like my enemy.”
Warmth burst in his gut. If Laura considered Meredith her enemy, he almost felt sorry for the woman. But not quite.
Laura made an angry sound under her breath. He’d bet she wasn’t even aware of having made it. Her unconscious loyalty warmed him all the way down to his soul.
“You truly have no recollection of her whatsoever?”
“None.”
“Convenient,” Laura muttered.
Alarmed, he glanced over at her. “I’m telling you the truth. I have no idea why I married her.”
“She must be hell on wheels in the sack,” Laura commented sourly.
Nick laughed. “I’ll take you any day of the week and twice on Sunday over any other woman on the planet in that department.”
Laura threw him a vaguely skeptical look. “The thirty-year-old mother of two with a body under attack by gravity and who needs a slave driver of a personal trainer to keep her even remotely non-jiggly these days?”
“Yes. Exactly,” he replied firmly.
She didn’t look convinced.
He swore mentally. Just how much damage control did he have ahead of him to convince Laura that, in spite of this wife, she was the love of his life?
“Could your wife be behind tonight’s kidnapping attempt?”
The idea shocked him into silence.
Laura continued, “But why?”
“She wants to renew our vows?” he quipped.
“Not funny,” Laura retorted.
He sighed. “I imagine she wants to aggressively renegotiate control of my estate.”
“With a gun pointed at your head?”
“Precisely.”
“Bitch,” Laura breathed under her breath.
Nick laughed quietly. “My sentiments exactly.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Give her whatever she wants to divorce me.”
“She has probably taken almost everything you own already.”
He shrugged. “I’m not concerned about the money. I can always make more. I just want to get away with my life and my soul intact. I refuse to live always looking over my shoulder, worried that she might come after you and the kids someday.”
Laura’s expression snapped closed. Unreadable. Stubborn enough to give him a severe and unpleasant jolt. “Are we okay?” he blurted.
“No, Nick. We’re not okay. You’re married to another woman. You knew who you were and didn’t tell me. And now your past has put not only you, but me and Ellie, in danger.”
He nodded slowly. He couldn’t blame her for feeling any of that. But there was also no way he was giving up on them. He’d fight to the death to keep her and the kids.
They drove in heavy silence to his hotel and he led her up to his room. He’d just fished William’s flash drive out of his pocket to plug into his laptop when Laura’s cell phone rang. He frowned. It was nearly 2 a.m. Who’d call her at this time of night? Was it Adam, waking up from a nightmare and needing his mother’s voice to comfort him? Guilt at tearing Laura away from their son speared through him.
But then he heard a shrill female voice babbling through the line and Laura’s face drained of all color. Panic unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, including the moments after he first woke up in his box, ripped through him. Adam. Oh, God. What had happened to his son?
Laura was going to throw up. “What have you done?” she gasped in a horrible, unrecognizable voice at Nick. She shoved past him and ran for the toilet in the tiny connected bathroom.
“What happened? What’s going on?” Nick demanded right on her heels. “Whatever I’ve done, I’ll fix it. I swear.”
“They’ve kidnapped him,” she sobbed. “Adam and Lisbet are gone. Marta was drugged and just woke up. The police are at the house and the FBI’s been called.” Her stomach rebelled then, and she emptied what little she’d had for dinner into the toilet.
Ice-cold terror washed over Nick’s face. “Is there a ransom note?”
“No.” Laura splashed cold water on her face. It didn’t do a thing to drive back the nausea washing through her. She rinsed her mouth and headed into the bedroom.
“What else did Marta say?” Nick demanded.
“That’s it. Adam and his nanny are gone. There are signs of a struggle in the playroom. Lisbet must have put up a fight. The kidnappers have a six-hour head start and could be anywhere by now.”
She couldn’t stand still and moved around the room searching it frantically for she knew not what. Nick finally caught her in his arms and held her board-stiff body tightly against his until the worst of her panic passed.
“They’ve got my baby,” she wailed. “He must be so scared. If they hurt him—” she broke off on a sob “—oh, God.”
“I’ll kill Meredith if she’s behind this,” Nick gritted out.
Laura was swinging back and forth between terror and rage so fast she could hardly keep up with it. She gazed up at Nick with tears streaming down her cheeks. “What do we do?”
He gripped her shoulders tightly and stared into her stricken gaze, clearly willing her to hold it together. “We fight. We do whatever it takes to find him and get him back safe and sound.”
Under his hands, she squared her shoulders. “You’re right. Nobody’s messing with my baby and getting away with it.” Death dripped in her voice. Super Mommy had just gone over to the dark side. Whoever’d kidnapped Adam was going to pay in blood. She would find her son and get him back.
Perceptive as ever, Ellie started to fuss in the crib in the corner.
Nick suggested, “You take care of Ellie. I’ll make the arrangements to get back home.”
Laura nodded and stumbled to the crib the hotel had sent up while Nick called the airport and hired a private jet to take them back to Washington with all possible haste.
Nick joined her in the bedroom. “A plane will be ready in an hour. We’ve got about twenty minutes before we have to leave for the airport. The concierge will have a taxi waiting for us downstairs.”
Ellie’s tiny body snuggling tightly against hers calmed Laura enough that she could begin to think rationally. When the baby had fallen asleep in her arms, she said quietly, “I’m not entirely sure your wife is behind this. At least not directly.”
“Why’s that?” Nick asked in surprise over his shoulder as he threw his things into his suitcase.
“If she was involved in your original kidnapping, surely she was told when you were rescued. Which means she’s had a year to react to your escape. Why this, why now?”
“If she was involved with my kidnapping, then she’d have known I suffered a memory loss. If I didn’t come forward for a year, she might have figured I was never going to identify myself as Nikolas Spiros.”
“Either way,” Laura reasoned aloud, “she had no reason to believe you were ever coming back. Why would she have planned an elaborate kidnapping of your son? Because believe me—nobody got through my house’s security without some serious planning.”
Nick made a rueful face. “Maybe she found out I’d visited my old attorney and figured I was going to make a run at getting my company back.”
Laura thought aloud. “Okay. She had a motive to grab Adam. But still. Just a few days to hire a kidnapper, get him in place, find your son, figure out how to get past my estate’s formidable security, and execute a kidnapping? That’s just not plausible.”
“Who else could it be?”
She answered grimly, “It’s not like you and I don’t have other enemies. What about AbaCo? Could they be trying to blackmail you into not testifying against them?”
Fury glittered in Nick’s gaze. “They most certainly have experience with kidnapping and the personnel to pull one off on short notice. And they know you and the children are my life. But going after a child? Those bastards …” His voice trailed off as he choked on his fury.
She knew the feeling. “The trial starts next week. If they have Adam, we’re going to have to find him fast.”
“I know just the person to ask if AbaCo has Adam.”
“Who?”
“AbaCo’s CEO.”
“Werner Kloffman?” Laura echoed. “Where on earth would we find him? High-profile people like him tend to move around the globe and don’t exactly advertise their whereabouts.”
“What do you want to bet he’s in Washington pulling strings and trying to get the government to drop its case against his company?”
“Good point. If you’ll step aside and give me access to your laptop, MysteryMom needs to contact a few strategically placed people within the government.”
“MysteryMom?” Nick asked.
“That’s my email handle when I’m doing work for DaddyFinders, Inc. I built up a pretty decent informant network over my years of searching for you.”
He looked at her soberly. “I am eternally grateful you never gave up on me. You and I won’t give up on Adam, either. We’ll find him.”
A sob threatened to erupt from her chest, but she shoved it down. Her baby boy needed Super Mommy firing on all cylinders right now.
Nick must have sensed her momentary weakness because he said encouragingly, “Lisbet’s with him. She’ll protect him as fiercely as you would.”
She nodded gamely, refraining from suggesting that Lisbet might very well be dead and out of the picture by now. She knew all too well how important it was not to dwell on the negative, but instead to focus on hope and determination and keep moving forward.
Nick’s arms came around her. She clung to him tightly. Despite the unresolved problems between them, they were united in purpose when it came to retrieving their son. And that was all that mattered for now.
She disentangled herself from his arms and headed for Nick’s laptop computer.
Nick woke up as gray dawn crept around the jet’s window blinds, surprised that he’d managed to catch a nap. Fear for Adam slammed into him moments after his eyes blinked open, so heavy on his chest that he could hardly breathe. He tossed and turned in the uncomfortable airplane seat, tearing himself apart with guilt over having brought this danger to his son. Thankfully, Laura was asleep stretched out across several seats and Ellie was crashed in a playpen. He slipped out of his seat and tiptoed over to check on Ellie. The poor baby’d had a rough night last night and was sleeping deeply.
This aircraft was equipped with Wi-Fi, and he used it to connect his laptop to the internet and check the morning news. The gossip sites were having a field day over his return to the public eye. Even serious news outlets were commenting freely on the status of the Spiros fortune now that Nikolas Spiros was back. Analysts were speculating gleefully on whether he would attempt to seize control of his company from the German firm that had owned it for the past half-dozen years.
A limousine met them at the airport when they landed and whisked them south to Laura’s estate in Virginia. The mansion was crawling with police and FBI investigators who had frustratingly little information to share about Adam and Lisbet’s disappearance. The FBI kidnapping expert on scene seemed alarmed by the lack of a ransom note.
When Laura pushed the fellow to speculate on who’d taken her son, the FBI man hinted that perhaps whoever’d taken Adam didn’t feel a need to leave a note but felt the message was loud and clear enough without one.
Nick’s jaw tightened grimly. Which was a fancy way of the guy saying he thought AbaCo had Adam and that the kidnapper’s intent was clear—stop the child’s father from testifying against the company.
It didn’t help matters that, by midafternoon, the estate’s front gate was crowded with luridly curious reporters. The FBI had felt it would be best to go public with the story, plastering the news with pictures of Adam and putting the public on notice to look out for the little boy. It was a close call to say who hated the media attention more—him or Laura. Both of them were stretched to the breaking point by the lack of progress and the feeling of being trapped in their own home.
Finally, as they picked at the sandwiches a red-eyed Marta put in front of them, Laura’s laptop beeped to indicate an incoming message. She leaped from her seat to check it.
“It’s for MysteryMom,” she said tersely as she opened the message. Instinct had warned her not to reveal all her sources to the FBI team that had invaded their home. She’d kept her MysteryMom identity and email account to herself since the FBI was monitoring all her phones and other email accounts. Nick moved to her side quickly. The message, short and to the point, popped up. Kloffman is borrowing a home from friends at the following address. A posh street in the Washington, D.C. suburb, Old Town Alexandria, was named. The message was not signed. Not that he cared who had sent it, other than to want to thank the person someday … after Adam was safe.
Laura murmured under her breath, “We’ll have to sneak out past the FBI and the police.”
He nodded slightly. “I’ll engage them in conversation while you make arrangements for Ellie.”
He went downstairs and didn’t engage in conversation as much as he threw a tantrum, demanding that the law enforcement agencies do something. Personally, he understood that they had no leads to go on and their hands were tied until the kidnapper made the next move. But he kept that opinion to himself as he ranted and generally forced everyone’s attention onto him while Laura had a quiet word with Marta about watching Ellie for the night and milk in the freezer.
Laura slipped into the living room and made eye contact with him. He allowed her to talk him down off his fake ledge and the police were more than happy to let the two of them retire upstairs to the privacy of their suite.
“Are we good to go?” he asked Laura when the door shut behind her.
“Yes.”
He eyed the black turtleneck and slacks she’d laid out on the bed. “I gather you’re planning to break into the guy’s house?” he asked doubtfully.
“Do you have a better idea?” she demanded.
“Actually, yes.” He headed for her closet and pulled out an elegant linen sheath dress, silk stockings, fashionable stilettos, and an expensive pearl necklace. “Put these on. And do up your makeup and hair to the hilt.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Let’s knock on his front door. Or more precisely, you knock on the front door. He won’t think twice about opening the door for a woman who looks like you. Once he’s got the door open, I’ll join you. If we have to force our way in after that, so be it. But I bet he doesn’t put up a fight. He’s a businessman, not a thug.”
“You’re probably right. I’m not thinking all that clearly right now.” She glanced at him gratefully, and the spark of warmth in her eyes shot through him like a lightning bolt. Even in the midst of this crisis, she attracted him like no other woman.
She was authorized to be off her A-game. It was no surprise she’d fall back on her old CIA habits in a situation like this. But he knew life as a CEO. And if a beautiful, elegant woman showed up at his front door, he’d have let her in.
Laura dressed quickly and came back into the sitting room looking like a million bucks. Her flesh impact hit him like a physical blow. “You’re a hell of a woman,” he murmured.
“I’m a freaked-out mommy.”
“Stay strong, sweetheart. For Adam.”
She nodded and stepped close, leaning against him. They stood together quietly for a moment.
“Ready?” he murmured.
“Let’s do it.”
It was ridiculously easy to sneak out of their house. Laura knew every detail of the security system and made easy work of slipping past it. They pushed his BMW out of the garage in neutral and let it roll down the slight hill behind the house until it was out of sight of the mansion. Only then did Nick start the engine and guide the vehicle toward the back gate.
The trip to the Virginia suburbs of D.C. went quickly. Laura was grim and silent beside him. She definitely had her Super Mommy game face on.
The GPS efficiently led them to an elegantly restored row house in the heart of Old Town. Nick pulled into a driveway a few houses down and turned off the engine. He murmured, “You go first and I’ll lurk in the bushes until Kloffman has opened the door.”
Laura nodded coldly. Super Mommy was in full grizzly-bear mode. Satisfaction coursed through him. AbaCo’s senior leadership had coming whatever Laura could dish out and then some.
He followed her to the front porch and crouched beside the lush rhododendrons flanking the front steps. She rang the bell and stepped back so she’d be in plain sight through the door’s peephole.
The door opened.
Laura pitched her voice in a sexy contralto. “Mr. Kloffman? I work for the United States government. Do you have a few minutes to speak with me?”
“Of course. Please come in.”
Bingo. Show time.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_9cecfc60-aeef-57ae-a33e-539ab21c3ae1)
Laura was surprised at how easily it all came back to her—the technical skill, intense focus, the cold calm. Her mindset also included absolute willingness to do whatever violence was necessary to find and rescue her son.
As she passed through the front door, she placed her shoe strategically in front of the wood panel. Nick materialized behind her and had slipped inside before Kloffman was even aware of the man behind her.
“Who in the hell are you?” Kloffman growled as he caught sight of Nick.
“My name’s Nikolas Spiros, Herr Kloffman.”
The German spluttered, looking back and forth between the two of them. “You! I thought I recognized you. You’re that Delaney woman.”
“That’s correct,” Laura answered grimly. “We need to chat, sir.”
“How dare you? How did you find me? I want my lawyer.”
“This isn’t that kind of chat, Werner,” Nick said in an entirely too pleasant tone of voice. “Shall we step into the living room?”
The German must have sensed the threat underlying Nick’s words and moved without comment into an antique-filled parlor. A thrill coursed through her at the danger in Nick’s voice. She remembered sharply why she’d been attracted to him in the first place. It had been this sense of sexy risk that had clung to him.
Kloffman sank down in a wingback chair and stared defiantly at the two of them.
“So here’s the deal, Werner,” Laura said reasonably. “We’re going to ask you a series of questions. If you give us the right answers, we’ll leave and not bother you again. If you give us the wrong answers, you are going to have a very long night. We’d like to keep this civilized, but we are under no obligation to do so. Understood?”
Kloffman swore under his breath in German. “I know who you are. I’ll see you both in jail for this.”
Nick shrugged. “Panicked parents politely question the man most likely to have kidnapped their son, and you think any jury in the world is going to do more than slap our wrists?”
“I didn’t kidnap your son!”
“Of course you didn’t,” she replied smoothly. “The same way you didn’t kidnap Nick. Your flunkies did it for you. Plausible deniability is important for a man in your position, is it not?”
He shrugged, obviously aware that answering the question couldn’t help his cause.
“Surely you knew about Nick’s kidnapping and the kidnappings of dozens of other people who were held aboard your ships. It must have been a profitable little side business. What were you getting for your special guest service? A million dollars a year per prisoner? More?”
Nick stiffened beside her. His rage was palpable at being in the presence of the man who very likely was the kingpin behind his kidnapping.
“Care to comment on who paid to have Nick kidnapped?” she asked without warning.
Kloffman’s gaze darted back and forth between them. He definitely knew something he wasn’t sharing with them.
“His loving wife, perhaps?” Laura snapped.
“I have no idea.” Kloffman’s eyes slid down and to the left, a sure tell that he was lying.
Laura leaned in close. “Was it her? Yes or no.”
“No.” Another glance at the floor and a jump of the pulse pounding in his temple.
She looked up at Nick grimly. “At least that mystery’s solved. It was your bitch of a wife.” She looked back down at Kloffman. “Where’s our son?”
“Why would I kidnap some child?” Kloffman demanded angrily. “I’m not a monster.”
“Five years in a box on one of your ships says that’s not true,” Nick snarled.
Kloffman subsided, glaring belligerently.
Laura spoke grimly. “The fact remains that no one but you has both the means and the motive to kidnap our son and pressure Nick not to testify against your firm. AbaCo’s going down in flames next week and Nick is the spark that’s going to ignite the firestorm.”
Kloffman smiled coldly. “AbaCo is by no means going down in flames. Quite the contrary.”
A chill passed down her spine. The German was entirely too sure of himself for her comfort. He should be sweating bullets if he was involved in Adam’s kidnapping. But instead, he was sitting here as smug as could be, actually smirking at her.
She pulled out her pistol, and it had the desired effect on Kloffman. He paled. She spoke grimly. “Convince me why I should believe that you and AbaCo had nothing to do with our son’s disappearance.”
Kloffman’s lips pressed tightly shut and she leaned forward, caressing his cheek with the barrel of the weapon. Her voice was velvet. “You see, Herr Kloffman. I’m a mother. And if something bad happens to my baby boy, I’m not going to give a damn whether or not I live or die. It won’t matter to me one bit if I rot in jail for the rest of my life. So I have nothing to lose by putting a bullet through your knee—or through your head.”
Kloffman began to tremble and a fat bead of sweat ran down the side of his face. Now he was getting into the proper spirit of things.
“I swear. I had nothing to do with your son’s kidnapping.”
Nick replied tersely, “Convince us you and your goons didn’t do it.”
Kloffman stammered, “I’m sure nobody in the firm would do such a thing without my approval.”
Nick leaped all over that. “So you’re admitting that no major black ops happen at AbaCo without your knowledge?”
“Are you kidding?”
Kloffman looked like he’d blurted that out without thinking. He fell silent and a thoughtful look entered his eyes. She gave him as long as he wanted to work through whatever was on his mind. Nick also looked inclined to let the man stew in his thoughts for the time being.
Eventually, Kloffman said heavily, “Many things happen without my knowledge at AbaCo. I’m purely a figurehead around there.”
Laura stared. The statement had a definite ring of truth to it. The guy was a figurehead? “Who’s the real power at AbaCo, then?”
Kloffman glared at Nick. “As Ms. Delaney put it so succinctly, a cabal of criminals put in place by your bitch of a wife.”
“Can you prove that?” Laura demanded.
“Why should I?” Kloffman shot back.
She considered him carefully. “Because I’ll hold you responsible for kidnapping my son and kill you if you don’t?”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “Look. They pay me a small fortune to be the public face of AbaCo. But I’m not about to go down in flames, as you say, for all the activities they’re into.”
Nick leaped on that right away. “What else is AbaCo up to besides human trafficking?”
Kloffman snorted. “That’s the tip of the iceberg.”
Laura had no trouble believing that. “Again, I ask if you have any proof.”
“Why should I hand any of it over to you?”
Nick asked reasonably, “Who else would you give it to? If you were going to hand it over to the U.S. government, you’d have done it before now—when it became clear the feds are going to come after AbaCo with everything they’ve got in the upcoming trial. But you saw what Meredith’s goons did to me. I think you’re afraid to cross her. And rightly so, by the way.”
Nick was doing an excellent job of playing good cop. Which left her to play bad cop.
She leaned forward. “Don’t be stupid, Werner. I have the gun, and I won’t hesitate to use it.”
The German looked back and forth between them. “Let me make a phone call to inquire about your boy.”
She considered briefly. Why not? What could it hurt? She nodded and allowed the man to pull out a cell phone. He put it on speaker and laid it on the coffee table in front of him before hitting a speed dial number.
Nick commented as a man’s voice came on the line, “I speak fluent German.”
She threw him a grateful look. That could prove immensely helpful.
Kloffman nodded irritably at them. “Klaus. It’s Kloffman. Did you hear that Nick Cass’s boy was kidnapped?”
“It’s all over the news,” a heavily accented voice replied in English. “Serves the bastard right.”
Kloffman asked, “Do you know anything about it that could implicate AbaCo?”
“No.” The guy sounded genuinely surprised. “We had no such orders. Besides, everyone would suspect us right away. We’re not that stupid. Just do what you were sent to Washington to do and stay out of things that don’t concern you.”
Laura was surprised by the scorn in this Klaus guy’s voice. That didn’t sound anything at all like the respect due a genuine CEO. She glanced over at Nick and he was frowning, too. Apparently, Werner was telling the truth about being a figurehead.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Klaus.”
The German ended the call. “Satisfied?” Kloffman spit out.
She answered, “Not yet.”
“Look. I have children of my own. I would not hurt your son.” As her gaze hardened, he added in desperation, “Why would I kidnap your boy? The trial’s going to be stopped anyway.”
Laura started, and it was Nick who leaned forward and said smoothly, “Who did you cut the deal with, Werner?”
“The CIA.”
Laura was stunned. Her own agency had sold her out?
Thankfully, Nick didn’t miss a beat and nodded beside her. “Of course. I’ll bet you’ve held a few prisoners for the agency, maybe given them a heads-up where certain shipments were headed. You scratch their back, and now you’ve called in the favor and forced them to scratch yours.”
“Exactly,” Kloffman exclaimed, obviously relieved that Nick was on the same page. “In another day or two, the federal prosecutors will announce that national security could be compromised by proceeding with the case, and all charges will be quietly dropped. I have no need to kidnap your boy to silence you.”
Then why did Meredith and the shadow operators at AbaCo go after Adam? Petty revenge? The question still remained as to how they’d managed to move so fast against her heavily defended estate. It just didn’t add up in Laura’s gut. She was missing something major, here.
Nick, bless him, was carrying the conversation while her mind stayed frustratingly blank. He asked the German, “When will the announcement be made stopping the trial?”
“Two days from now.”
Laura’s heart sank. If AbaCo was behind his kidnapping, they had two days before Adam’s life became irrelevant to his kidnappers. How were they ever going to find him in so little time? Worse, if the trial was dead in the water, she and Nick had no leverage whatsoever to force this man to help them find Adam. Unless …
She leaned forward. “Werner, here’s the deal. Even if the trial is halted, Nick and I aren’t going to stop. We’re going to go public with everything we have on your company. We’ll use the media to full advantage, and with what we’ve got on AbaCo, we’ll destroy the company. In fact, we can probably do a more effective job of ruining it without the constraints of a trial to tie our hands. Do you believe me?”
Kloffman stared at her for several long seconds. Finally, he said heavily, “What’s it going to take to stop you from doing that?”
He might be a figurehead, but he undoubtedly liked his paycheck. He also seemed to understand that, as the figurehead, he’d be the sacrificial lamb.
Nick replied gently, “Save yourself, Werner. You don’t strike me as a bad type. Don’t let Meredith and her cronies drag you down with them.”
“How?” Werner snapped. “Who’ll believe me?”
“Why wouldn’t people believe you?” Nick asked. “I’m living proof that someone at AbaCo is up to no good. And there are others who have been victims of the company.”
Werner shook his head. “You don’t understand. It’s not about the prisoners they keep. It’s about the cargo.”
Nick glanced at her. Werner seemed inclined to talk to Nick, so she nodded subtly at him to take the lead. “What about the cargo?” Nick asked.
“AbaCo has become the freight carrier of choice for every nefarious group you can think of—drug lords, weapons dealers, terrorists, slavers, illegal lumber smugglers, you name it.”
Nick paled beside her. It had to be painful to hear that his family’s firm had fallen so far. “Do you have proof?” he asked hoarsely.
Kloffman hesitated one last time, and then he capitulated all in a rush. “I’ve been collecting it for years. Bit by bit. I had to be careful. But I’ve got cargo manifests, incriminating emails from customers, shipping documents, even financial records.”
“Why haven’t you taken it to the authorities before now?” Nick queried.
“What authorities?” Kloffman answered bitterly. “The same ones who are also using AbaCo to do their dirty work? How do you think the CIA gets weapons and supplies to the various regimes Uncle Sam can’t publicly support?”
The three of them fell silent.
Laura eventually broke the silence. “Who within the company does the dirty work?”
“The Special Cargo division,” Kloffman answered promptly.
That made sense. The people on trial for kidnapping Nick came out of that group. But the Feds had been combing through that division’s records for most of the past year and not found anything to indicate that AbaCo was engaging in widespread criminal activity.
“Do you have access to their real records, then?” Laura asked curiously.
Kloffman nodded eagerly. “I’ve been copying everything for the past three years.” He added sourly, “They didn’t even bother to restrict my access to the accounts. They think I’m too stupid to notice what they’re up to.”
Nick made a commiserating sound, and Werner shared an aggrieved look with him. Nick really was incredible at garnering empathy and trust from the German. He asked gently, “Do you have copies of these records with you? If you wouldn’t mind sharing them with us, I swear to you we’ll see they fall into the right hands.”
Kloffman reared back sharply. “No way. They’ll kill me.”
No need to ask who “they” was. Nick said soothingly, “Not if they don’t know who the source of the leak was. I give you my word of honor we won’t reveal where or who we got the information from.”
Kloffman didn’t look convinced. Laura spoke quietly. “Somebody has kidnapped our son. He’s six years old. And he’s going to die if we don’t find him. Soon. Please help us, Herr Kloffman. I promise we’ll help you.”
He nodded slowly. “I will give you everything I have. Maybe you can find something about your boy.”
Laura rose to her feet eagerly and Nick did the same.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t have the files with me. I keep them in a safe place.”
As would she in the same situation. So. It was going to require a leap of faith on their part, too. “Of course, Herr Kloffman. How soon can you get us a copy?”
“Twenty-four hours, maybe.”
A whole day? Her gut twisted in dismay. But it wasn’t like she had any choice in the matter. “Please hurry.” Desperation crept into her voice. “He’s so little….”
Kloffman squeezed her elbow reassuringly. “I shall do what I can to help, Fraulein.’’
She nodded, too choked up to say any more. Nick quietly traded contact information with the German and then guided her to the front door.
“A word of advice, Kloffman,” Nick commented as he reached for the doorknob. “Convince whoever’s actually running the show to sell off the pre-1970 ships before you have a major accident. Dump the Euro debt and invest in new, Norwegian-built, fast ships.”
Kloffman stared. “I beg your pardon?”
Nick shrugged. “Spiros Shipping has been in my family for three generations. And it’s being run into the ground. Stop thinking about short-term profit and look to the future before you destroy my company.”
The German stared, flummoxed. “Assuming I still have a job in a week, I’ll try.”
“Thank you for your help, Herr Kloffman,” Nick said soberly as he opened the front door. “We are in your debt.”
Out of reflex, Laura reached for the light switch and turned off the porch light as she stepped outside. The night was dark and cold, and she was more terrified than ever of the forces that had taken her son from her.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_5cb229a1-2392-5af9-9e42-78a95adba1eb)
Nick’s breathing still hadn’t returned to normal, and he’d been driving as fast as he dared back toward the estate for nearly a half hour. His company had become a major crime syndicate, compliments of a wife he didn’t remember? Why on God’s green earth had he ever married the woman? He supposed it didn’t matter, now. The deed was done, the damage cascading down on everyone he loved.
Laura burst out, “Do we dare trust him? With Adam’s life?”
“I think we should,” he answered.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “The time may come when we need Kloffman to hesitate before he calls his dogs down on us or Adam. I think we gave him good reason to hesitate.”
Laura sighed beside him. “You’re right, of course. I’m just not capable of thinking that clearly right now.”
He glanced over at her. “You’re not supposed to be thinking clearly. You’re a mother. You’re allowed to be panicked.”
“But Adam needs Super Mommy.” Laura’s voice cracked, sending a glass shard of pain through him. How was she ever going to move past the fact that he’d done this to their child? Even assuming Adam returned home safe and sound—and he refused to consider any other possibility—how were they going to move forward as a couple?
He asked slowly, “Do think you’ll ever forgive me for all of this?”
She stared across the dark interior of the car at him a long time before she answered. “I don’t know. After you lied to me in Paris and then spent the past year knowing you were living under an assumed identity and never told me, I don’t know how I’m going to trust you again.”
If only he could remember why he’d deceived her in Paris! For the first time, he regretted not really trying to work with the doctors who’d attempted to help him regain his memory.
“Now what?” Laura asked.
What, indeed? He was as stymied as she was and hated feeling this helpless. He’d felt this way in his box and had vowed never to be at anyone’s mercy again. No, this time it was his son’s life on the line. His control threatened to crack. Swearing silently, he fought off the urge. Laura needed him strong. Adam needed him strong.
“I don’t have a lot of contacts in the crime world,” Laura commented, “but I’ll put out some feelers. See if anyone’s heard anything.”
“I’d lay odds that whoever kidnapped me grabbed Adam, too,” Nick declared. “I’d love nothing better than to get my hands on that person and wring their neck.”
“You only want to wring their neck? I had something slower and more painful in mind,” Laura replied.
He shrugged. “I got you and the kids out of the deal. I learned things about myself in that box I’d have learned no other way. Things that have changed my life—changed me—dramatically for the better. Yes, the experience sucked. But, at some point, I have to get over it and get on with my life. I’m not kidding when I say that part of my past is over and gone. I don’t dwell on it.”
“I’m not so altruistic,” Laura muttered.
“You can sit around hating your life and bemoaning all your problems. Or you can accept that everyone has them and get on with dealing with yours in a positive frame of mind. I’m not saying life can’t be hard as hell. But it is possible to find joy in small things in the midst of all the bad stuff. I have my kidnapper to thank for making me understand this.”
“Will you be so philosophical if we find out he or she is behind Adam’s kidnapping?”
“I’ll kill him.” He added grimly, “And I’ll be entirely philosophical about it afterward.”
Laura smiled reluctantly and reached over to put a hand on his leg. He took a hand off the steering wheel and covered hers.
“We’ll find Adam,” Nick murmured. “Just keep the faith.” Why did it take something so awful to bring them together like this? How was he supposed to feel anything other than too guilty to breathe when he was finding Laura again in the midst of losing his son?
The house was in an uproar when they walked in. Marta had gone upstairs for Ellie’s 2 a.m. feeding and one of the FBI agents had discovered their disappearance.
The FBI agent-in-charge, a guy named Cal Blackledge, was not amused and chewed them up one side and down the other. Nick blandly explained that the two of them had needed to get away for a little while, to be alone and share their grief without an army of onlookers. Blackledge didn’t look convinced, but Nick and Laura stuck to their story, and there wasn’t much the FBI man could do about it.
As their chewing out was winding down, another FBI agent rushed into the kitchen. “You just got a message from who we believe to be the kidnapper.”
Laura’s coffee mug slipped out of her fingers and shattered into a hundred pieces all over the floor. Nick moved for the door nearly as quickly as she did, but Blackledge still got to Laura’s office first. When Nick stepped into the spacious room, a team of people was huddling in front of her computer. They moved aside, and Laura slipped into her desk chair. He watched eagerly as she clicked on the email message.
Your son and his nanny are safe. They will stay with me until you testify against AbaCo. When those bastards are put away for good, then you can have your son back. Do not fail, or else.
Laura looked up at him in shock, the thought plain on her face the same as the one he was having. The kidnapper was an enemy of AbaCo’s?
He asked, “What’s the kidnapper going to do when the government announces that it’s going to drop its charges?”
Laura paled and started to shake. He knew the feeling, dammit. They had two days until Adam’s life was forfeit. Two days to find and save their son.
Nick had faced some scary crises in his life, but nothing compared to this. His son’s life was in mortal danger. Seeing the threat on the computer screen before him made it real in a way it hadn’t been until now. Nausea ripped through him.
“There’s a video attachment,” one of the FBI agents announced.
Laura clicked on it. A picture of their son smiling up at the camera flashed onto the computer monitor. The video rolled and Adam placed a bright red leaf into what looked like some kind of scrapbook. “Look at my pretty leaf,” he announced in his clear, sweet voice.
Lisbet’s voice came from off camera. “Tell Mummy and Daddy we’re doing fine and that you’re safe and warm and well-fed. Tell them Joe has been très kind to us.”
Adam nodded. “I’m learning all kinds of neat things about nature. But I miss you. Joe says you’re fighting the bad man for him. Hurry up and win. I want to go home.”
A sob escaped Laura and she turned to Nick, burying her face against his side. He gripped her shoulder so tightly he was probably hurting her. But he couldn’t help himself.
The FBI agents went into high gear around them.
“Identify that leaf.”
“Nature. He’s being held in a rural area.”
“Joe. Get a list of disgruntled former AbaCo employees.”
“The child turned the page in that album. Can we digitally enhance the leaves on the second page?”
“Analyze the grain of the floorboards. They look old. Rough. Maybe in a cabin of some kind.”
The words flowed past Nick, but the only ones that stuck were the final ones in the note. Do not fail or else.
Or else.
Laura lifted her head. “Lisbet used the French word for very, très. She doesn’t speak much French. She was signaling us that the kidnapper is French or speaks French.”
Blackledge snapped, “Make that a list of French former AbaCo employees.”
A flurry of phone calls took place around them while Laura replayed the video over and over, presumably looking for more clues. Or maybe she just needed to see Adam’s face. It was both sweet relief and stabbing pain to see him. He might be safe for now, but that or else hung heavily over the little boy.
“AbaCo is refusing to release any employee lists to us without a subpoena.”
“Then get one,” Blackledge snapped.
“That’s going to be a problem,” someone replied. “They’ll have to release information about their American staff to us, but not their overseas employees.”
Blackledge frowned. “The French courts are notoriously slow, particularly when it comes to cooperating with Americans. We’re not exactly at the top of France’s list of allies these days. If AbaCo refuses to cooperate, it’s going to take too long to get what we need.”
Nick said sharply, “Spiros Shipping had a major office in Paris. AbaCo probably still uses it.”
“Do you think Kloffman—” Laura started.
Nick cut her off gently. “Why go to the top when you can go to the bottom?”
She frowned at him and he explained, “I ran Spiros Shipping for well over a decade. I’m betting Kloffman didn’t fire every one of my old employees when AbaCo took over. People who used to work for me must still be there.”
“What good does that do us?” she asked.
“My family believed strongly in knowing every employee and in building trust and loyalty among them. If I can find some of the old staff, they’ll help me.”
She pulled out her cell phone and slapped it into his hand.
“Let’s see if they bothered to change the phone numbers,” he muttered. He dialed the international number for Spiros Paris and was pleased when the call went through.
“AbaCo Shipping,” a female voice said in his ear.
“Marie? Marie Clothier? Is that you?”
She switched into English to match his. “Oui. Who may I ask, is this?”
“Nick—” Then he corrected, “Nikolas Spiros.”
The woman took off in a spate of excited French he only half caught. When she’d finally wound down, he said, “Look, Marie. I need your help. My son has been kidnapped and we’re trying to figure out who did it. I need a list of all the employees fired from the Paris office since AbaCo took over. Is there someone left from the old days who would do that for me? Quietly and quickly?”
“But of course. Let me connect you with François Guerrard.”
Nick laughed. “He’s still working? Why didn’t he retire years ago?”
“He would have if AbaCo hadn’t cut our pensions so badly.”
“Ahh, I’m sorry. I suppose it goes without saying that it would be best for you if you didn’t mention this little call to anyone at AbaCo?”
She laughed wryly. “That would be correct, sir. Ahh, it is so good to hear your voice again. I never believed what they said about you—”
He gently cut off what was likely to become a lengthy monologue from the talkative woman. “Thank you, Marie. I’m afraid I’m in a great hurry. We need to find my son.”
“Of course, Monsieur Nikolas. I shall pray for him.”
In a few minutes, a list of fired employees was sitting in his email inbox. Blackledge printed it out and his people went to work tracking down every single person on the list. Nick and Laura stayed out of the way and let the FBI invoke its formidable connections with Interpol to do the job.
The leaves were identified as belonging to plants indigenous to the mid-Atlantic states. Nick supposed knowing Adam was in one of a half-dozen states was better than nothing, but not much.
Laura spoke to Nick thoughtfully. “Why did Lisbet make a point of saying they were warm? It has been unseasonably warm all over the East Coast this past week. Is there somewhere substantially colder within this region that would prompt her comment?”
“Mountains or a coast,” Nick replied.
Laura turned to one of the FBI agents. “Would those leaves we saw be more likely to grow at high elevations or near the ocean?”
“The second leaf is a bush that tolerates salt spray well, ma’am.”
“The shore it is,” Laura announced.
Blackledge nodded his agreement. “You sure you don’t want back into this business, ma’am?”
She laughed without much humor. “Just get my son back so I can be a mommy.”
Nick put an arm around her shoulders and was gratified when she leaned against him. Within the hour, hundreds of law enforcement officials were combing the woods of coastal Virginia, searching for an isolated cabin. It was a needle-in-a-haystack hunt, but he appreciated the effort nonetheless.
A command center was set up in their living room to coordinate the various search teams, and he and Laura were only in the way. They eventually retreated to their suite to let Blackledge’s team do its job.
It was late afternoon when Nick’s phone dinged to indicate an incoming text message. He checked it quickly. “Kloffman. He wants to meet us in Washington tonight. Says he’ll have what we need then. Do you think Agent Blackledge will lynch us if we sneak out again?”
She answered gravely, “I do. I’d suggest we tell him what we’re up to this time.” Their gazes met in mutual understanding. This was one of those times when no words were necessary for them to communicate perfectly.
Nick nodded. His thoughts drifted to his wife, Meredith, and the roadblock she represented to his future with Laura. “You do know that the minute I’m clear of her, I’m going to ask you to marry me, right?”
“And you’re so sure I’ll say yes?” Laura replied tightly.
He stared, thunderstruck. “You wouldn’t marry me?”
“Nick, my son is gone. Everything I thought I knew about you turns out to be a lie. You have a wife. You cheated on her with me in Paris.”
“Everything I know of her says I barely knew her and she no doubt married me purely for my money. There’s no way it was a love match.”
“I don’t care how good or bad she was. You broke your marriage vows. I have a problem with that.”
“I don’t remember any of it,” he replied with barely restrained frustration. “I can’t imagine ever having married her. And even if I actually thought it was a good idea at some point, I’m not that man anymore.”
“It’s a lot for me to accept on faith.”
“Laura, I love you with all my heart. Adam will come home safe and sound. This crisis will pass, and I’ll still love you. I’ll love you till the end of time.”
“Is love enough?” she asked in anguish. “I’m not so sure.”
“Love is everything,” he replied with a desperate calm that belied the panic beneath.
Without replying, she turned and walked out of the room. His heart broke a little more. He had to find a way to put his family back together. There had to be a way.
How was it she could feel like she was drowning even though she wasn’t even in water? Laura’s world had come apart and she didn’t have any idea how to put it back together again. She’d have thought her stress would have gone down slightly after the note from the kidnapper. The FBI profilers were confident that Adam wasn’t in any immediate danger, and whoever had him was on their side in the fight against AbaCo. That had to count for something, right?
But instead, she could hardly function. Her thoughts were disjointed, she was unable to plan anything, and even the smallest of tasks overwhelmed her. Only Ellie kept her sane. The infant adhered to a steady schedule of eating, cuddling, and sleeping, and Laura was immensely grateful for the infant’s rhythms.
It took twice as long as usual, but eventually, Laura formed a plan of action. First on her agenda was to contact some people at the CIA and see if Kloffman’s claims were true. Had the agency cut a deal with him to block the AbaCo trial from going forward in the name of national security? If so, she planned to pull every string she had at her disposal to get the CIA to delay making the announcement for a few more days.
Laura slept restlessly in the recliner in Ellie’s room, waking up a little after dawn. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed a familiar phone number. The CIA operator forwarded her call to her old boss.
“Hi, Clifton, it’s Laura Delaney.”
“I wondered how long it was going to take you to call me.”
“So it’s true? There’s a deal to stop the AbaCo trial?”
“You know I’m not allowed to comment on such things, dear.”
“And you understand the life of an innocent child is on the line?”
He sighed. “I do. I was so sorry to hear about the kidnapping. Is there any ransom demand?”
She replied sharply, “Why, yes. There is. The kidnapper is insisting that Nick testify against AbaCo and bury them, or else.”
Heavy silence greeted that announcement. It was all the answer she needed from Clifton. The CIA had, indeed, cut a deal with AbaCo. “When is it going public?” she asked. “And don’t tell me that information is classified. We have to find Adam before the news is released.”
“Close of business today.”
It wasn’t enough time! “You have to delay it. We have to find my son first!”
“I understand, Laura. I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t make any promises.”
She hung up, staring in dismay at the happy clouds and dancing unicorns on Ellie’s pink walls. Adam was running out of time.
The FBI upped the man power over the course of the day, redoubling their efforts to locate Adam, but to no avail. Wherever the kidnapper was hiding him, he’d picked his spot well.
It was afternoon when another email came to her Laura Delaney address from the kidnapper. She raced downstairs and into the office to see it. Nick was already there, and he smiled encouragingly at her. Did that mean there was good news?
She sat down at her desk and read the note:
Thought you might like another video to know your son’s okay. I promise I won’t hurt him as long as you do the right thing and send AbaCo to hell where it belongs.
The attached video showed Adam playing some sort of pick-up-sticks game with Lisbet and squealing with laughter. For a kidnapping victim, he looked shockingly hale and hearty. The FBI team observing with her murmured in surprise.
“What?” she looked up at the faces around her in concern.
Blackledge shook his head. “This is the damnedest case. I’ve never seen a kid having the time of his life being kidnapped.”
“Stockholm syndrome?” another agent suggested.
Laura frowned. Stockholm syndrome was when kidnapping victims began to sympathize with their captors. It was an involuntary psychological reaction to the threat of dying.
Blackledge replied, “I don’t think so. The kid and nanny look like they’re genuinely having a ball.”
Laura asked, “Are they just making the best of a bad situation?”
One of the other analysts leaned forward, watching a playback of the tape. “They’re showing no stress-related body language. The muscles of the nanny’s face are relaxed and open, and see the way Adam’s lounging, here? He’s not taking any sort of self-protective posture. These two feel completely safe with their captor.”
Another agent piped up. “In both notes, the kidnapper has made a point of reassuring the parents that their son is safe and in no danger as long as things go his way. He used the phrase ‘I promise’ in the latest one, indicating he has a strong sense of honor and right and wrong. His word matters. As a profiler, I have to say I don’t think this guy has any intention of harming either of his victims. That’s not to say he won’t snap at some point and change his mind. After all, he’s enraged enough at AbaCo to have taken the drastic action of kidnapping someone. So, he does have a breaking point.”
Laura made a sound of distress. “And we’re going to see it when he finds out the trial’s not going to happen at all.”
The call from Laura’s CIA contact came in just a few minutes before five o’clock. The look of abject relief on her face said it all: they’d gotten their extension on the announcement that the AbaCo trial had been suspended.
She put down the phone and said, “He’s got a firm commitment to delay twenty-four hours and a tentative agreement to postpone the announcement for up to forty-eight hours beyond that. It was the best he could do.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing. He and Laura could breathe for another few hours. Her shoulders slumped in front of him and it was all he could do not to gather her up, carry her upstairs and make love to her. Anything to escape this endless nightmare for just a few minutes. But no way would she agree to such a thing. Regretfully, he turned his attention back to figuring out something, anything, to do to help find Adam.
He said thoughtfully, “You know, the kidnapper keeps emphasizing burying AbaCo, not necessarily the trial itself. You already said it to—” he broke off sharply. Mustn’t mention their extracurricular visit to Kloffman. He continued in chagrin, “You said it to me. What if, instead of testifying, I go on a media blitz to tell my story and slam AbaCo all over the airwaves? Done properly, I could probably tank the stock price and get the senior leadership fired. I could mire AbaCo in scandal so deep they’ll never recover.”
Laura turned around and looked up at him doubtfully. “If you do that, you’ll sacrifice a shot at a legitimate trial at some future date. You’d be giving away your chance to get justice for the crimes committed against you. Maybe you just launch a campaign to overturn the sale of Spiros Shipping and get it back.”
Nick shrugged. “If I get my son back, who cares about justice or shipping companies? Even if they skate on the kidnapping charges, you have to admit there’d be a certain justice in destroying the reputations of AbaCo’s senior leadership and wrecking the company.”
Laura winced. “How many people would you put out of work? Do you think you’re capable of destroying the business your great-grandfather built and your entire family poured its heart and soul into?”
Nick had to unclench his jaw to grind out, “How can you ask that of me? Do you really think I’m that shallow and materialistic? He’s my son. Nothing on earth is more important to me than him.”
Laura scowled back at him.
It was one thing to know they were both just lashing out in their stress and panic, but it was another thing entirely to stop the unreasoning fury bubbling up inside him, demanding that he yell at someone, anyone, in his agony. He knew Laura was feeling the exact same way. But it was still hard not to turn on her. They had to maintain a unified front. Work together. Adam’s life depended on it.
Blackledge broke the heavy tension between them. “May I remind you that a massive manhunt is in progress as we speak? Let’s not give up on the idea of finding and rescuing your son outright, shall we?”
Laura glanced over at Blackledge in chagrin. He was right. But it was so in her nature to have a plan B in case the main plan failed, and a plan C if plan B didn’t work out, that she couldn’t help coming up with contingencies for the crisis at hand.
The second video had put her mind a little more at ease. It was a good thing for a mother to know her child wasn’t scared or in pain. And thank goodness Lisbet was still alive and with him. She’d protect Adam with her own life, Laura had no doubt. But there was still the dilemma of how to proceed, given that they weren’t ultimately going to be able to meet the kidnapper’s demand in a court of law.
Nick’s thoughts must be running in the same vein, because he said soberly, “It would be a calculated risk to launch a media war against AbaCo. Maybe it would satisfy the kidnapper, maybe not. And if not, we’d have blown our shot at a trial that would satisfy the guy. What do you think about it, Laura?”
She looked up at him thoughtfully. “I think Agent Blackledge is right. Let’s allow the manhunt to play out while we see what our … friends … can come up with now that we’ve got a few more days to search for Adam.” She looked at him significantly. And in the meantime, they’d meet with Kloffman.
Nick nodded resolutely. “Done.”
She touched his hand lightly, silently thanking him.
He responded, “In the mean time, how do you feel about heading up to Washington for the night?”
She nodded and glanced over at the FBI agents within easy earshot. “You know me well. I’m starting to feel claustrophobic just sitting around here. I’d like to be close to Langley in case I have to twist some arms in person tomorrow. I’ll go pack a bag for Ellie.”
Nick nodded briskly. “I’ll call the hotel and have them arrange for a babysitter.”
Blackledge snorted. “Are you kidding? You’re bringing along an FBI agent to guard your baby.”
Laura glanced at Nick in chagrin. He said smoothly, “Excellent idea, Agent Blackledge. I’ll call the Imperial Hotel and get us all a suite.”
The FBI man nodded. “Morris, you’ve got kids, right?”
Agent Morris grinned. “Yes, sir. Five. I’m fully checked out on diapers.”
“Perfect,” Laura announced. “We’ll leave in an hour.”
Ms. I-can-handle-anything, I’m-totally-in-control vapor locked when it came time to choose a dress to wear to dinner. It was the darnedest thing. Laura stood in front of the hotel closet, staring at the dresses Marta had packed for her, mostly conservative business wear appropriate for a mother who was deeply concerned about her child’s safety. And for the life of her, she couldn’t choose one. It was as if her brain just shut down.
Nick stepped out of the bathroom, fresh from a shower, wearing dress slacks and no shirt, toweling his hair dry. He looked at her in concern from under his towel. “Everything okay?”
The man really was observant. “No,” she wailed. “I can’t decide what to wear.”
He moved swiftly to her and gathered her into his arms. Smart man. He knew something was seriously wrong if such a little decision was hanging her up. His body was warm and humid against hers and smelled of his expensive soap.
He murmured into her hair, “You’re doing great. I have no idea how you’re holding it together the way you are. Just a little while longer, and we’ll get him back. Courage, darling.”
“I think I’m all out of courage,” she whispered.
“Then borrow some of mine. Remember that Adam’s happy and safe and the kidnapper has promised not to hurt him. We’ll find a way to meet the kidnapper’s demands. And Werner Kloffman’s going to help us do that. He’ll give us his files, and we’ll be one step closer to getting our son back. But the first step is to pick out a dress and put it on.”
Wise advice. Just take this one moment at a time, one simple task at a time.
He turned with her still in his arms to face the closet. “I’ve always liked you in blue. How about this one?” He pointed at an elegant, navy-blue suit dress.
“It’s not very sexy,” she said in a small voice.
He laughed. “Sweetheart, you could wear a burlap sack and a paper bag over your head, and I’d still find you sexy.”
She sighed. “You do have a golden tongue. I don’t know if you mean a word you say, but you say all the right things.”
He kissed her forehead lightly. “I don’t say them to anyone but you, so I must mean them.”
She let him help her slip on the dress. He zipped it for her, and the perfectly tailored garment hugged her body with its slim lines. Nick left to finish dressing, and she pulled her hair back into a quick French twist. She added stockings and conservative high heels to the ensemble but stopped short of adding a pearl necklace to the outfit. She didn’t want to look like her grandmother, after all. She tugged the dress’s V-neck wider open and tightened her bra straps to increase the undergarment’s lift. There. Definitely non-granny cleavage.
She smiled at Ellie who was playing in the middle of the big bed. “Sweetie, you do wonders for Mommy’s assets.”
The baby burbled back. Verbal early, Ellie was. Must be a girl-baby thing. She scooped up the infant and inhaled deeply of her fresh baby scent. “Mommy’s going to go torture Daddy with this naughty dress for a few hours. It’s going to be loads of fun. Be good for the nice FBI agent, okay?” She blew a raspberry against her daughter’s tummy and laughed when Ellie squirmed and gave her a sweet, gum-filled smile.
Agent Morris poked his head through the open door. “Mr. Cass is ready whenever you are.”
She nodded at the man. “Ellie just ate. She should be good for at least four hours. There’s a bottle in the fridge just in case, and she should go down around 10:00 p.m. Order whatever you want from room service and watch whatever you want on TV.” She added dryly, “And no boys in the house, please.”
The agent grinned. “You forgot to ask me if I have a current CPR license and a babysitting certificate from an accredited after-school program.”
Laura laughed. “I’m not paying you that much.”
Morris looked around the plush suite. “Hey, this is the best babysitting gig I’ve ever landed. You and Mr. Cass have a nice evening. Ellie and me, we’ll get along just fine.” He patted the bulge on his right hip and added grimly, “Mr. Glock and I will see to it that nothing happens to your little princess on my watch.”
Laura nodded, abruptly serious. “Thank you.”
She stepped out into the living room and Nick made an appreciative sound. “You’re stunning, Super Mommy.”
She made a face. “I’m not feeling very super at the moment. I feel like I’m hanging on by my fingernails.”
“Well, you’re doing it with style. You look fabulous.”
She rolled her eyes. “We’ve been over this before. I’m the thirty-year-old mother of two.”
“That’s correct. You’re everything I’ve ever dreamed of and more.”
Her heart melted a little. It would be so easy to ignore his trespasses from the past. To fall into his beautiful blue gaze and forget everything else. Exactly the way she had for the past year.
Like it or not, she had to face up to the fact that their current predicament wasn’t entirely Nick’s fault. She’d been as guilty as he of ignoring the past and pretending that nothing bad could be lurking in that giant memory gap of his.
If she lost herself in him and his damnably magnetic charm again, she’d regret it as sure as she was standing here. Someday reality would rear its ugly head again, just like it had this time, and bite her. Who would get hurt the next time? Her? The kids? All of them?
It was time. She and Nick had to confront the past head-on and make peace with it once and for all. They had to do it for their children … no matter what the cost to the two of them.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_92c734bd-3aa5-54a0-b788-538e122a40f5)
The place Kloffman had picked for their meeting was dark and quiet. The booths had tall dividers separating them and plenty of privacy. Laura sighed beside Nick as they stepped inside.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured.
“Too easy a place to do surveillance. Not a good spot for a clandestine exchange.”
“Really?”
“Loud, rowdy, and crowded is a better venue. It’s impossible to eavesdrop more than a few feet away, there’s lots of noise pollution to foul up directional microphones, and people are hard to keep track of in a big crowd.”
It made sense. And she was the former spy, after all.
She continued, “Our best bet is to get in and get out of here, fast.”
“We’ll just order drinks, then. We’ll get what we came for and leave immediately,” he replied.
She nodded beside him and pasted on a pleasant smile as the maître d’ approached. They were led to a booth near the back of the place, and Kloffman was already there, looking impatient. Nick smiled to himself. Typical German. If the guy wasn’t five minutes early, he considered himself late.
Kloffman stood as they approached. Laura took his hands and greeted the German warmly. Quick on the uptake, Werner kissed her cheek and ushered them to the table like they were old friends. A waitress took their drink orders and left. Finally. They were alone.
Laura leaned forward and murmured past a warm smile that kept her lips from moving in any significant way, “Do you have the files?”
“Yes, my dear, I do.” He brought out a small box from under the table, gaily wrapped in hot-pink paper and tied with a wide white ribbon. A white bow nearly overwhelmed the fist-sized box.
“How delightful!” Laura exclaimed. “You shouldn’t have brought me a gift. Now I feel bad for not bringing you anything.”
Werner laughed back. “My wife insisted. She said you should open it when you get home.”
Laura duly tucked the box beside her on the banquette. She then led the conversation deftly into a discussion of how Werner’s grown children were doing, and what he’d thought of Southeast Asia, where he’d taken a recent vacation. Nick was impressed. How she knew that about the German executive, he hadn’t the slightest idea. Or maybe she’d just made it up and Werner was adept at following along with her patter.
Nick forced himself not to look around the place, not to check for listeners or watchers. He leaned back, looping an arm over the back of the banquette and smiling at Laura like a proud husband enjoying his attractive and effervescent wife. It wasn’t hard to act besotted with her. He was besotted with her.
In due course, he and Werner argued good-naturedly about who would pick up the tab for the drinks, and he ultimately let Werner pay the bill. With a promise to stay in touch and come visit Werner in Germany soon, Nick and Laura stood up to leave.
And just like that, the entire records of AbaCo’s Special Cargo division for the past several years were in their possession.
Nick hailed a cab and Laura climbed in as he held the door for her. He settled in the seat beside her. “Now what?”
“When we get back to the hotel, we open his gift and see what he gave us,” she answered lightly, glancing warningly at the back of the cabbie’s head.
He supposed she had a point. They couldn’t be too careful at this late date. He relaxed and watched the city lights pass by outside. Washington really was a lovely city, a gracefully aging lady.
Agent Morris was on his feet, gun in hand and leveled at their chests, when they walked through the door to their suite. Nick nodded his approval as the guy lowered his weapon.
“You two are back early. Everything okay?” the FBI man asked.
Laura shrugged. “I made it through cocktails, but I’m not comfortable being away from Ellie. I convinced Nick to bring me back here for a quiet dinner in our room.”
Morris nodded in sympathy. “How about I go take a nap with our little princess? Then I’ll be in good shape to stand watch through the night. And in the mean time, you two could probably use a little privacy.”
As the agent retreated, Nick called room service and ordered dinner.
He joined Laura at the desk in the corner of the living room as she booted up her laptop and plugged in the thumb drive she’d found inside the gift box. A long list of file names scrolled across her screen.
“How’s it look?” he asked.
“If the files contain what their titles suggest they will, we’ve got a whole lot of dirt on AbaCo we didn’t have an hour ago.”
“Anything jump out at you that might have something to do with Adam’s kidnapping?” he asked.
She typed quickly. “I’m going to do a sort for files created in the past year. The start date for the search will be the day you were released.”
She undoubtedly didn’t mean for that subtle note of blame to enter her voice, but it did. His gut twisted at the notion that his liberation was in some way the cause of Adam’s predicament. He had to make it up to the boy, and to Laura. Adam had to be okay.
As she continued to type in what looked like a long list of random words, he asked, “What are you doing now?”
“Setting up keywords for the computer to search for within the files. The guys at AbaCo aren’t likely to run around talking about kidnapping openly. They’ll use euphemisms like ‘picking up a package’ or ‘moving perishable goods.’”
Nick snorted. He’d felt like perishable goods plenty of times, sailing around in that damned shipping container. Laura threw him an apologetic glance.
“I’ve also set up a sorting algorithm to copy and organize all the content on this drive. It’ll take a few minutes to run.” She sighed heavily. “In the meantime, I think you and I need to go over the events from immediately before your kidnapping.”
He jolted in alarm. “But I don’t remember—”
“Yes, but I do. I thought I’d tell you everything I can remember and see if it jogs any memories for you or if you remember anything about some detail that might be important.”
Her suggestion made sense, but why did she sound so reluctant to revisit what had supposedly been a torrid and thrilling affair? “You’re making me nervous. What’s so terrible about our time together in Paris that you haven’t told me?”
“You truly don’t remember any of it?” she asked in a small voice.
“Nothing. I’m sorry.”
She waved off his apology and took a deep breath. “You saved my life the night we met.”
“What?” Shock poured through him. “How?”
“My CIA field partner and I were attacked and you came out of nowhere. You grabbed our elbows and told us to come with you or die. Kent shook off your hand and demanded to know who you were.”
Nick frowned. “I thought you types worked alone. You had a partner?”
Unaccountably, she blushed slightly. “Certain operations were best suited for couples.”
Ahh. Damn. But it wasn’t like he was in any position to cast the first stone at her. He had a wife floating around in his past. Of course an extraordinary woman like Laura had other men in her life. He asked as lightly as he could manage past his abruptly hoarse throat, “Were you two a couple?”
“Were. Past tense by then. The demands of keeping our roles as coworkers and lovers separate was too much strain on the relationship.”
“Why did I grab you two?”
Laura frowned. “It was late at night. It had been raining and the streets were mostly deserted. We were in the Quartier Latin—the Student Quarter. Lots of winding little streets and alleys. Several men had just come around a corner about a block ahead of us, and you materialized by my side. You must have come up from behind us. When Kent jumped away from you, you wrapped your arms around me and yanked me into an alley.”
“Why did you come with me when your partner didn’t?”
She smiled a little in recollection. “You were extremely handsome. Not many girls would mind having a man like you throw your arms around them and drag them off.”
Nick frowned, scouring his mind for the slightest recollection of what she was describing. He came up blank. Frustrated he asked, “Then what happened?”
“I heard a noise in the street. Then a scuffle. Kent shouted something. It sounded like the beginning of my name. Then it cut off. And then nothing more.”
“What did you and I do?”
“At the first sound of fighting, you pulled me down the alley. By the time Kent went quiet, you didn’t have to pull me anymore. You had a car not far away and we drove off into the night. The rest is, as they say, history.”
Misery filled her dark gaze and Nick moved quickly to embrace her. “Talk to me. What’s so upsetting to you?”
“I left him, Nick. I abandoned Kent. I should have stayed and fought. Maybe the two of us could’ve bested whoever jumped him.”
Oh, how well he knew the world of regret and self-recrimination. “Sweetheart, what’s done is done. It’s just as possible that the two of you would have lost that fight. Whatever fate met your partner could also have befallen you. There’s no way of knowing. I assume you did your best to find out what happened to him?”
“The CIA and I turned Paris on its head looking for him. But he was just … gone. Very much like how you disappeared. He’s never been seen or heard from since.”
Nick frowned. “Is there any chance he was kidnapped like I was?”
She shrugged. “I suppose. We know AbaCo held more prisoners over the years than the dozen or so they’ve released in the past twelve months. For all I know, there are more men and women just like you still floating around in international waters where law enforcement agencies can’t touch them.”
“Maybe we’ll find the rest of them in the files Kloffman gave us.”
“God, I hope so,” she muttered.
Turning his attention back to Paris, he asked, “Do you have any idea how I found you that first night or why I pulled you out of there?”
“You refused to answer any of my questions about it and just said you ‘had a feeling’ there might be trouble.”
He grinned ruefully. “I highly doubt I was psychic back then. I had to have known something.”
She sighed. “That’s what I thought. But every time I brought it up, we’d end up kissing and then … well, you know. My superiors thought we might be able to develop you into an asset once we learned more about you, so they told me not to press you too hard.”
It was his turn to sigh. “I do wish I could remember falling in love with you the first time. I’m immensely grateful I got to do it again.”
Her arms tightened around his waist. “I’m just grateful I found you. I swore I wouldn’t give up until I did.”
He murmured into her hair, “And it’s that same stubbornness that’s going to bring Adam home to us.”
“From your lips to God’s ears.”
He lifted her chin lightly, sealing her words with a kiss. He’d meant for it to be a simple gesture. Harmless. But instead, her arms wound around his neck, and with a sound of need in the back of her throat, she was suddenly all over him. And her desperation was all the excuse his needed to cut loose.
His arms came around her fiercely, lifting her off her feet and crushing her against him. They traded frantic kisses, tongues clashing as their hands ripped at their clothing. Never breaking the chain of heated kisses, they stumbled toward the master bedroom. He kicked the door shut with one foot as she dragged him by the open shirt toward the bed. They fell across the mattress, and his hands plunged into the deep V-neck of her dress, finding and seeking plump handfuls of female flesh. He shoved her clothing aside, his mouth fastening on one rosy peak. She arched up into him with a cry of need, filling his mouth with her bounty.
And then she was tearing at his remaining clothes, dragging his zipper down and freeing his rock-hard erection. He lifted his mouth away from her long enough to mutter, “How do you feel about three children?”
She laughed and fumbled in his back pants pocket, freeing his wallet, and fishing out the ubiquitous emergency condom inside.
He yanked her dress up and her panties down while she shoved his slacks aside and put on his protection. And then she grabbed his hips with eager hands, pulling him forward impatiently, her legs wrapping around him hungrily. He plunged into her heat, groaning at her tightness as she surged up around him.
It wasn’t pretty or elegant. It was a fast and furious tangle of clothes and limbs and heavy breathing as they raced pell-mell for escape from everything to do with their real lives. It felt so good to lose himself completely in her, to sink into the pleasure of her body, to turn himself over to pure sensation, to turn off his mind completely and think of nothing at all. Just the blinding ecstasy of nerves shouting for release and the ever-more-urgent collisions of flesh on flesh as they both strained toward oblivion.
The cries started in the back of her throat, small at first, then building in intensity as her climax neared. He kissed her deeply, sucking up her pleasure hungrily. Their tongues took on the rhythmic movement of their bodies and the slick slide nearly pushed him over the edge. Her body went taut beneath his, arching up hard into him. He tore his mouth away from hers to stare down at her, reveling in the way her eyes glazed over and her breath stopped as a shattering orgasm broke over her. Her shuddering groan was the final straw. He plunged deep one last time as his own body exploded.
It was almost as if he passed out for a second. Everything went dark and peaceful and quiet, and nothing existed but shivering pleasure tearing through his body in wave after wave of exquisite, almost painfully intense, sensation.
Time lurched into motion once more. Laura was panting and her hair was a disheveled and entirely sexy mess around her face. Perspiration coated his bare chest, and somehow his shirt had gotten tangled up around his shoulders. Laura’s dress was askew and her lips were pink and slightly swollen.
“We shouldn’t have,” she gasped.
“Why not?”
“Adam. Here we are having a good old time … wasting precious minutes we should be using to find him … so selfish …” She rolled away from him, yanking violently at her clothes, putting them back in place if not exactly to rights.
Who was she referring to when she spoke of selfishness? Him? Her? Both of them? “Sweetheart, a little emotional release isn’t a bad thing. We’re both stretched to the breaking point—”
She cut him off with a sharp gesture of denial.
If he knew one thing, it was how to survive. And that meant being supremely selfish sometimes. Grabbing happiness whenever and wherever he could find it, hoarding it to himself, and reliving it greedily. He tried again. “You’ll be no good to Adam if you don’t take care of yourself.”
“I’m fine. He needs me, and I let myself be distracted…. I can’t believe you went there with your son’s life on the line.”
“I’m sorry. But I think you’re underestimating how stressed out you were. Don’t you feel even a little bit better?”
“No. I feel guilty and self-indulgent. If something happens to Adam, it’ll be my fault.”
“Laura.” He took her by both shoulders and forced her to look up at him. “You did not kidnap him. You are not responsible for this. Don’t take guilt onto yourself that is not yours to carry.”
“Easy for you to say,” she snapped. “You conveniently forgot everything in your life you should feel guilty for. You’ve got a built-in free pass.”
He pulled back sharply. So. The truth finally came out. She did resent his memory loss, and she didn’t forgive him for it. He’d long suspected she harbored hidden anger about it, but she was such a damned good actress, she’d never really let on how she felt.
He understood her perspective. Really. But it wasn’t as if he could do anything about it. He was what he was, like it or leave it. And recent mind-blowing sex notwithstanding, apparently she’d rather leave it. Leave him.
He went cold from the inside out. It was as if he froze, every cell and fiber of his being crystallizing in an agonizingly slow spread of needle-sharp pain. The muscles of his face froze, and he couldn’t make a meaningful facial expression in that moment if his life depended on it. Only his thoughts continued to function, spinning fruitlessly round and round like a car doing donuts on sheet ice.
How were they supposed to proceed from here? Either she trusted him or she didn’t. Forgave him or she didn’t. Accepted him—all of him, his past and his problems included—or she didn’t.
The verdict was in. His attempt to make a life with her and the kids was an epic failure.
His survival instinct kicked in. Must keep busy. Give himself small jobs to do. Count the ribs in the walls of his box. Check his food and water supply. Exercise and stretch. Press his eyes close to the small hole in one wall of the box. Keep his retinas acclimated to light. Think about the business plan for the new company he was going to start when he got out of here. Just. Keep. Moving.
Mechanically, he mumbled, “I wonder if our dinner’s here yet.” Take care of basic body needs first. Food. Water.
“I’m taking a shower,” she announced, revulsion plain in her voice.
She wanted to scrub the feel of him off of her. The frost surrounding his heart hardened a little more, constricting painfully. He’d lost his son, and now her. The blow was almost more than he could bear. An urge to crumple to the floor, to curl up in a ball, to close his eyes and slip into the black abyss in his mind nearly overwhelmed him. He almost wished for his box. Things had been simple in there. Clear. Survive one day at a time. One sunrise to the next.
But this—this he wasn’t sure he could stand.
He stood in the middle of the bedroom and stared at nothing until he heard the shower water cut off. The sudden silence spurred him to motion and he stumbled out into the living room.
Laura emerged from the bedroom a while later. He had no idea how long it took her to dress. He pulled a chair out for her at the table their dinner had been laid upon. She sat down, silent, and he moved around to sit across from her. The rounded stainless dome over his plate had actually kept his fillet mignon lukewarm. The meat was tender and juicy. It probably tasted wonderful, but he couldn’t tell. It all tasted like sawdust.
Laura ate quickly and then moved over to her computer to start cruising through the AbaCo documents. The search for Adam was all they had left between them.
He had files of his own to search. The ones he’d lifted from William Ward’s desk after the attorney had been murdered. Maybe they’d have information in them that might lead to his son. Even the idea of such a project overwhelmed him right now. He needed to think more simply than that. Move to desk. Open laptop. Turn it on. Insert flash drive into USB port.
“What’s that?” Laura asked suspiciously.
“The thumb drive I found in my lawyer’s desk.”
Her brows shot up in surprise. “I assumed you’d already looked through that and hadn’t found anything worth mentioning.”
He sighed. “I was avoiding it, actually. I expect there’ll be information in here about my past, and I wasn’t ready to face it until now.”
The dishonesty of his words tore at his tongue as if it were being ripped off a frozen well handle. He still wasn’t ready to face his past. But it wasn’t like he had any choice. Adam’s life hung in the balance, and he’d walk through the fires of Hell for his son.
Laura’s gaze was dark and accusing.
The directory of files on William’s secret storage device scrolled down the screen in front of him. It looked like a list of client names. Most of this stuff was probably highly confidential. He glanced through the list. Smith. Spangler. Spiros.
There he was. He clicked on his name.
A sub folder opened up and a list of files unfolded before him. He browsed the titles curiously. They mostly looked like business contracts. But on the third page of file names, one in particular caught his eye. It was a report from the same private investigator who’d been looking into the Nick Cass identity and found nothing. It was dated the day William had called and insisted Nick come to the Cape—the same day William had died. Nick abruptly felt as if he’d just been kicked in the stomach. Hard. Taking a deep breath, he clicked on the report and started to read.
“What did you find?” Laura asked from across the desk. Sometimes the degree to which she was observant made living with her damned hard. Or more to the point, made living with secrets around her damned hard.
He answered heavily, “I think I just found my prenuptial agreement with Meredith.”
Chapter 11 (#ulink_9f8a9ad3-b026-52aa-a377-ec66b0ba2a0d)
What little breath Laura had left after the mood swings of the past two hours whooshed out of her. She felt like a washcloth that had been twisted and squeezed until every last drop of life had been wrung out of her. She was empty. Emotionally done in. Logic told her this was an extreme situation and not to make any major life decisions in the midst of the crisis. But the urge to sweep aside everything and everyone who stood between her and Adam was irresistible.
Nick began to read aloud. She exhaled carefully as he went through a ridiculously huge list of assets. Nikolas Spiros hadn’t been merely rich. He’d been wealthy beyond imagining. And she had a pretty big imagination.
“Listen to this,” he exclaimed. “If I die of unnatural causes, she gets nothing.”
“As in zero?”
“That’s correct. Not a dime. And in fact, she’s required to return any jewelry, clothing, cars, homes, or cash assets accrued during the marriage to my estate.”
“Wow. Trust her much, did you?”
“Apparently not.”
“Sounds like you thought she was a potential black widow even before you married her,” Laura responded.
Nick was frowning, too. “It does beg the question, why did I marry her in the first place if I thought it was a good possibility that she’d try to kill me for my money?”
“Were you always that mistrustful of the women you dated?”
“It was an issue wondering if women wanted me for myself or for my wealth. But at some point, you have to take a chance and go with your gut. I may have gotten it wrong with Meredith, but I got it right with you … twice.”
She brushed aside the overture. Adam was her entire focus at this juncture. But the mystery of Nick’s marriage to a woman he clearly thought dangerous tantalized her. Was Meredith behind either or both kidnappings after all?
The man she knew—both in Paris and now—simply wouldn’t have married a woman in whom he had so little faith. Surely Nick’s core personality hadn’t changed that much in the past six years. “Do you have any idea how you met Meredith?” she asked.
“No, I don’t.”
She asked cautiously, “Would you mind if I researched your wife a little?”
His gaze was open and honest, and he answered without hesitation. “Be my guest.”
Thank God. He was finally willing, not only to face his past, but to let her see it, too. She minimized the AbaCo files and pulled up her favorite search engine. She typed rapidly.
In seconds, pictures of Nick and Meredith from the front pages of the tabloids leaped onto her screen. “Attractive woman,” Laura commented.
Nick shrugged. “Beauty comes from inside a person. You’re attractive. From what I know of her, she has the heart of a snake. She may be well-groomed, but she is not attractive to me.”
Laura might have smiled under other circumstances. But as it was, she kept typing grimly. “She was living pretty high on the hog when you met—designer clothes, expensive hotels and spas, jewelry running into hundreds of thousands of dollars …” She typed some more. “Did you know she was collecting art? It looks like she’d bought a couple million dollars’ worth by the time you two hooked up.”
Nick looked about as interested as if she’d told him the price of tea in China had gone up by a penny a pound.
Laura poked around some more, but then leaned back, perplexed. “I can’t find the source of her money. She doesn’t come from a wealthy background, and I’m not finding any indication she had a high-paying job. She had a high school education from an average school. No college. She wasn’t a model. Several years prior to meeting you, she started tossing around the big bucks. She didn’t appear to be dating any men who could’ve financed that sort of lifestyle. According to her tabloid appearances, she seemed to be picking up mostly good-looking toy boys and footing the bill for them.”
Nick made a face. “Maybe she was a hooker.”
Laura snorted. “Even high-end working girls don’t pull down the kind of money she was spending. She was blowing through three to five million dollars a year.”
“Was she running up a massive debt? Maybe she married me to dig herself out?”
Laura gestured with her chin toward his laptop. “Is there any record of your attorney running a background check on her? My lawyer used to run one on all the guys I dated in college, and I didn’t inherit anywhere near the wealth you had.”
Nick scowled. “I seem to recall William checking out my girlfriends at university, and it drove me crazy.”
“Did you tell him to stop?”
He laughed. “I doubt William would have listened to me. He was the executor of my father’s estate and had the power to do pretty much whatever he pleased. As I recall, he didn’t think I was exactly the most responsible young man on the planet.”
“Was he right?”
“Absolutely. I was in my early twenties, good-looking, smart, and too rich for my own good. Girls flocked to me, and I had no problem taking advantage of that. William kept me on a stupidly tight financial leash. Good thing he did, too. I might have blown my inheritance before I grew up and got interested in the shipping business.”
“What else could Meredith have been up to that pulled in so much cash?” Laura asked thoughtfully.
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Cindy Dees и Carla Cassidy
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Spy’s Secret FamilyWhen tycoon Nick Cass wakes up in a hospital room, he has no memory of the beautiful woman at his side. Yet when Laura Delaney tells him their son has been kidnapped, Nick has no choice but trust her – and rescue their chance at a future.Operation Baby Rescue Elise was devastated when the doctors told her that her newborn daughter had died shortly after birth. Finding comfort in a support group, she meets widower Jared… and their unanswered questions about their losses might just lead them to a new family…Cowboy’s Triplet TroubleAfter a reckless one-night stand Grace tracks down the father of her new triplets – and discovers that he has no intention of being a dad. But, when his brother, gorgeous rancher Jake Johnson, comes to her rescue, it seems Grace might have found her hero after all…