Capturing the Commando. Colleen Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ she had clearly sustained wasn’t serious enough to drop her into a coma, or maybe even kill her.

      As they continued driving south, he pointed out an exit. “That’s the one. You need to take that one.”

      “I’ve got it—got it.” Garrett darted a nervous scowl over his shoulder. “You know, Rafe, you’re even more annoying when you’re a backseat driver.”

      “You don’t have to like me, buddy.” Rafe smiled without a trace of humor, thinking that his computer geek brother-in-law wouldn’t last a day in infantry. “Just keep in mind that I’m in charge here—and you’re my prisoner in all this—every bit as much as she is. You be sure and tell the cops and feds that.”

      SHANNON PEERED through slitted eyes, then started at the unexpected dimness. Though she felt the movement of a vehicle, it was different, no longer the vintage Caddy with its white-leather backseat.

      Sometime during the day she had been moved, strapped into the dark gray cloth rear seat of a completely different vehicle. She sat up and then hissed through clenched teeth as her headache reignited.

      “Feeling any better, Special Agent?” Rafe Lyons turned in the front passenger seat to look her over. “You look better. Color’s improved.”

      “Thanks, Nurse Ratched,” she said, and raised her cuffed hands to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Nice to know you care.”

      “Good to see your sense of humor’s intact.” A wry grin tipped his mouth—a mouth that under different circumstances she might think of as sensual.

      “You’re mistaken. I’m not laughing, cowboy. What time is it? Where are we?”

      “You’ve been in and out of it all day,” he said. “You remember anything?”

      Vague snippets crossed her bruised synapses. The droning hum of a highway. Wisps of quiet conversation. A stop someplace—a small house?—where an older woman’s sympathetic face floated into view as she helped Shannon change her bloody top. She saw Rafe’s face, too, hard-set with concentration as he placed a bandage on her forehead and fed her what he had claimed was a mild painkiller, then helped her to wash it down with bottled water.

      Had there been a sleeping pill, too, despite the risks of mixing one with her head injury? Probably not, Shannon decided, recalling the sleepless nights she’d spent in anticipation of the meeting she had set up with Lyons online—a meeting where she’d planned to continue her bureau-sanctioned role as a disaffected girlfriend offering information on his sister’s killers. The biggest operation she had taken part in since the hostage debacle in Iowa, Rafe Lyons’s capture was perhaps her final chance to prove she was fit for duty.

      Suppressing a groan at the thought of how she’d blown it, she forced herself to say, “I remember stopping someplace. There was an older couple, I think. Someone helping you…”

      “I forced them,” Rafe was quick to claim. “Just like I’m forcing you and Garrett. I’m the only one here in violation of the law.”

      Instantly she understood that he was protecting his accomplices from the consequences of their actions. Shielding his brother-in-law, especially, so Garrett Smith would keep his freedom. Would be around to raise his child.

      Considering the questions his wife’s murder investigation had brought up, Shannon wasn’t sure the man deserved the Ranger’s sacrifice. Nonetheless, she promised, “You let me go right now and that’s what I’ll tell everyone.”

      She didn’t really care about punishing the older couple—whom she suspected were retired military—for helping the Ranger. And if her suspicions about Garrett Smith proved true and Rafe learned of them, Lyons would probably kill his brother-in-law with his bare hands.

      Ignoring her offer, Rafe said, “It’s just about eight-thirty. We should make the motel anytime now. Then we’d better grab some dinner. You must be hun—”

      Eight-thirty? Her head spun as she considered the sheer number of lost hours, underscored by the fading summer sky and the dim silhouettes of trees along the roadside. Heart rate ratcheting skyward, she demanded once more, “Where have you taken me?”

      In the more than twelve hours since her capture, they could have crossed state lines twice or even three times. Though she knew they’d made at least one stop, she had no idea how long they had stayed off the roads—or how they could have possibly avoided what must have been a massive law enforcement effort to locate and rescue her.

      In the distance she saw lights, the dark towers of buildings stacked before a gray-blue blur. The ocean? Gulf? Could this mean they were still somewhere in Florida?

      “Little beach community, not too far from Palm Beach,” he said, confirming her suspicion. “Think of this as a vacation.”

      “Real funny,” she shot back. “And here I’d pegged you for a cowboy, not a clown.”

      “I’m neither,” Rafe said roughly. “Just a man looking to find out what happened to the only blood family he has left on this planet—and why someone would butcher my little sister like she was nothing. No one.”

      Empathy stirred Shannon’s heart as she heard the desperate grief behind his anger. Enough grief and desperation to throw away his career, his very freedom, to save his sister’s child.

      “You could drop this right now,” Shannon said. “Before somebody really gets hurt. People—even your superiors—aren’t without compassion for your situation, and you can bet the FBI and more local agencies than you can shake a stick at are all committed to the search for your niece and your sister’s killers. If you’ll let me, Lyons—Rafe— I could get you a good deal, maybe even keep you out of prison so you can see that baby when we find her. Be the kind of uncle she can count on to help raise her.”

      If we find her alive. Though the pair believed to have murdered Lissa Smith was suspected in other similar crimes, none of the missing babies had ever been recovered, and the purpose of their abduction remained a mystery. Black-market trafficking? Blood rituals? The possibilities were endless, each one more sickening than the last.

      “Listen to her, Rafe,” Garrett urged, a note of pleading in his voice. “It can’t hurt to listen to what she says.”

      The vehicle, which she’d decided was a midsize SUV of some sort, slowed to make a left turn beside a faded sign that read The Seashell Motel—Your Home Away from Home Since 1957. Behind it lay a long one-story structure, a single bar of back-to-back rooms squatting on the far side of a tiny, ill-lit pool. A very few vehicles, all of them older models, offered evidence that this mom-and-pop enterprise was barely clinging to life—a far cry from the luxury hotels she would have expected in this area.

      “I have no intention of listening to a word of Agent Brandt’s deal,” Rafe said firmly, clearly used to pulling rank on others. “I brought her here for one reason and one reason only. To talk her into mine.”

      “What about your career?” According to Shannon’s research, the thirty-two-year-old had little else. No steady girlfriend, no other family, and few friends beyond the members of his tight-knit Ranger unit, which had its home base in Georgia. Other than the accent, he’d left behind his West Texas past, including the rodeo bull riding circuit, where he’d competed in his youth.

      He was one cowboy who’d traded in his hat—along with his heart СКАЧАТЬ