Colton Showdown. Marie Ferrarella

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СКАЧАТЬ to be going like that for hours, I laughed and told her she was like one of the blue birds we saw in the spring. The comparison pleased her so I started calling her that. Blue Bird.” A wave of memories assaulted him from all angles and he shook himself free, unable to deal with them right now. “If you call her that, she’ll know you talked to me and she’ll trust you.”

      Tate nodded. It was worth a shot. “Thanks. That’ll help.” As he switched his cell phone to vibrate, he saw the way Emma was frowning. “What’s bothering you?”

      There was a time she would have told him he was imagining things, that nothing was bothering her. But that was when the job was all important to her, and nothing came ahead of that. Now a lot of things did. And she was worried.

      “Frankly, I don’t like you walking back into the lion’s den unarmed.” She knew he was pushing his luck. “You made it out twice unharmed. The third time—” she began skeptically.

      “Will be the charm,” Tate assured her, finishing her sentence in a far different way than she’d intended to finish it.

      But Emma continued to look unconvinced. “The people involved in this sex trafficking ring have already killed twice,” she reminded him. “What’s to stop them from killing you?”

      He shrugged indifferently, as if she were worrying for no reason. “Well, for one thing, killing me off would be bad for business,” he told her glibly. “They’re after the money I told them I’d pay for Hannah. Word gets around that they’ve killed a client and their little virgins-to-the-highest-bidder scheme suffers a serious setback.”

      He put his hands on Emma’s small shoulders. Funny, he never realized how fragile she could feel. Or how touched he could be by her concern. “Look, we’ve both been in law enforcement for a while now and nothing’s ever happened to either of us, right?”

      “That’s my whole point,” she insisted. She put one of her hands on top of his, silently bonding with him. “Our luck’s bound to run out eventually.”

      “Eventually means someday—not today,” he pointed out with conviction. “Now stop worrying—that’s an order,” he told her. “The sooner we get the information we need about whoever’s pulling those strings, the sooner we get to wrap this up and Caleb over there gets to make an honest woman out of you.”

      Emma’s mouth dropped open for a second, and then she shook her head. “I can’t believe you just said that. Do you have any idea how incredibly old-fashioned that sounded?”

      Her choice of words amused him. “You’d better get used to that, honey,” Tate told her, kissing the top of his sister’s head. “Old-fashioned goes with the bonnet and the butter churn.”

      Emma continued to look at him, a knowing look entering her eyes. She wasn’t all that unusual, she thought. “Tell me you wouldn’t give up everything for the right person if she came along.”

      “For the right person,” he echoed, momentarily conceding the point, then quickly qualifying, “If she came along. But until she does, I’ve got work to do. And right now, I’ve got to pick up a suitcase full of money before those thugs get antsy and decide to turn Hannah over to another bidder.”

      The suitcase full of money meant he was seeing Hatfield, his handler. The thought of her brother walking around with that kind of money in a briefcase made her nervous. “I’ll go with you,” she volunteered.

      But he had something else he felt was more important for her to do. “No, you stay here and make sure that your cabinetmaker doesn’t decide to do something stupid and wind up breaking down the hotel suite door and hauling out one or both of those bozos.”

      Emma came to her fiancé’s defense. “What would you do if someone kidnapped me?” Emma asked him pointedly, trying to make her brother see the situation from Caleb’s point of view.

      “Sending his next of kin a sympathy card comes to mind,” Tate answered dryly. And then his smile faded for a moment as he gave her a serious answer. “I’d track the kidnapper to the ends of the earth and gut him seven ways to Sunday—” But he was trained to do that. It was different with Caleb. These were men they were talking about, not cabinets. “But we’re not talking about me,” he pointed out.

      Emma shook her head as she laughed softly. “No, I guess we’re not.” She brushed a quick kiss against his cheek. She was going to worry until she saw him safe again. She couldn’t help it. She was built that way.

      “Watch your back, Big Brother,” she told him.

      “Always,” he said. Crossing to the door, he opened it then paused for a moment to look at Hannah’s brother. Lines of concern were etched deeply into his handsome, young face. “It’s going to be all right,” he promised the other man.

      The expression on Caleb’s face was half resigned, half hopeful.

      It echoed perfectly the sentiment Tate felt within his soul.

      The same two men he’d dealt with twice before were waiting for him in the hotel suite when he arrived with the briefcase of used hundred-dollar bills, arranged in nonsequential order, just as instructed.

      The bald man with the goatee opened the door to admit him before his knuckles could hit the door for a second time. Tate walked in, nodding at him and the equally bald African-American. On the latter, bald looked good. The same couldn’t be said about the man with the goatee.

      “It’s all there,” Tate told the African-American man eyeing the briefcase suspiciously as he placed it on the coffee table between the two men.

      The man flipped both locks at the same time, then spared him a glance. “You don’t mind if I see for myself, right?”

      It was a rhetorical question. Nonetheless, Tate chose to answer it in his own way. He quickly pressed the lid back down in place before the other man could look inside. Tate met the guard’s hostile gaze.

      “I’d expect nothing less,” Tate assured him.

      “Then what the hell are you doing?” the guard demanded hotly.

      Tate looked at the man with the goatee, then back at Waterford, the African-American. “I’m waiting for one of you to show me Jade.”

      “You’ve already seen her,” Waterford snapped. “Twice.”

      “You’re right,” Tate agreed amicably. “And now I just want to make sure that she’s actually here.”

      “He doesn’t trust you, Nathan,” the man with the goatee jeered.

      “Shut up,” Waterford ordered, obviously angry that his name had been used.

      Tate pretended not to notice the flare-up. “Well, do I see her?” he wanted to know, still keeping the lid down. Tate could feel his biceps straining as he continued to hold the lid in place. It had turned into a contest of strength, one that Tate was determined to win.

      Waterford did not take defeat easily. He looked as if he could snap a neck as easily as take in a deep breath.

      “Bring her in,” he instructed the other guard in the room.

      The latter was angry at being СКАЧАТЬ