Capturing the Commando. Colleen Thompson

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      His green eyes glared back at her. “You’d better think about your own career, sugar. Because from what I’ve learned about that hostage standoff back in Iowa, you’re about one screwup short of being booted from the only job that’s ever mattered to you…Daddy’s girl.”

      She blinked back angry tears that she would never dare shed. They blurred Lyons’s outline, smudging his dark navy T-shirt and the hard planes of his face.

      “Go straight to hell,” she murmured, her sympathy for his motives vaporizing in the white heat of her reaction to his cruelty.

      SHANNON WAS STILL SEETHING when Rafe finally ordered her into the room. Garrett had checked them into an end unit, a room decorated with cheesy paintings of the beach and a peeling seashell wallpaper border, though any view of the Atlantic had long since been obstructed by the newer oceanfront hotels.

      “I’m headed out to pick up dinner,” Garrett told them. “Anything you two want?”

      Shannon thrust her shackled wrists toward his face. “How ’bout something with a file baked inside it? Or better yet, a working cell phone?”

      Rafe shot her an annoyed look from where he was unplugging the second of two grimy-looking rotary phones. “Lock these in the Jeep, will you, Garrett? No need to tempt the agent. And as far as food, it’s just fuel, that’s all. So pick whatever you like.”

      Garrett pulled off his beach hat and raked his fingers through limp, sandy-blond hair. About five-ten and still a little on the pale side, he was nonetheless a decent-looking specimen. Squeamish, though, in contrast to the Ranger. Regardless of her suspicions, Shannon tried to appeal to his softer nature.

      “I could really use some aspirin or something, anything extra-strength to help knock back this headache.” Though that was true enough, she feigned exhaustion as she dropped into one of the old oak chairs and put her feet up on one of two sagging full-sized beds. “And maybe…if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, a box of tampons—super plus?”

      That part was pure fiction, but she had never met the man who would dare to call a woman on the bluff.

      “Um…” Garrett’s gray-eyed gaze slid toward Rafe, as if for help. When none was forthcoming, he finally shrugged and murmured, “Sure, I guess so,” before slinking out to escape while he could.

      “You’re good. I’ll give you that,” Rafe allowed as he stepped up to the door and hooked the security chain. “But don’t count on playing on his sympathies and turning him against me.”

      Stalking back to where she sat, he looked like a mountain of pure, male muscle—six feet three inches, and two-hundred-ten pounds’ worth, according to his records.

      Refusing to be intimidated, Shannon fixed him with a fierce look, daring him to come one step nearer. “And don’t count on getting my help by throwing my past up in my face. You don’t win friends with bludgeons—or is brute force all they taught you back in Ranger school?”

      He grimaced, and a long sigh followed. “Sorry, Agent. I know better. But that shot about me abandoning my men in wartime—that was way over the line. They’re family, too, to me.”

      “Then let’s agree. Family’s off-limits. Especially mine.” And most especially the father she had lost at age eight, the father she and her brother had both been raised to revere, with his every artifact an idol in their rancher uncle’s house. Her stomach shrank down to a red-hot coal as Rafe’s Daddy’s girl crack echoed through her memory.

      “Got it.” He stuck out his right hand, offering to shake.

      Ignoring it, she added, “And if you ever dare to bring up Iowa again, I swear to you that one way or another, I will find a way to burn you. You can count on it.”

      To his credit, he didn’t smile or remind her that she was the one in handcuffs but simply nodded. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Brandt.”

      “Good. Then right now, you have my undivided attention. Tell me about this plan of yours.”

      “All right, then.” He moved his bulky duffel bag to the closet alcove next to the small bathroom, then sat in the chair beside hers.

      “Okay,” he said. “The way I figure it, you can come out of this one of two ways. The inept, helpless victim—”

      “Enough with the flattery,” she said with a scowl.

      “Or the hero,” he finished. “The agent who managed to solve a crime and save a child your colleagues couldn’t, all on your own.”

      “I’m liking that part,” she admitted, imaging herself turning the tables in the process and marching the handsome fugitive in at gunpoint. As her fantasy unfolded, her big brother—who would almost certainly have come to Florida by this time—would stand up and lead the round of applause. “How ’bout we dispense with the cuffs and get right to it?”

      His forehead creased in either surprise or amusement. “I’m sure you’d enjoy that. But first, I need your agreement that you mean to help…with the best cause that there is.”

      “Let me guess,” she ventured. “It’s finding Lissa’s baby.”

      As he shook his head, a fierce light gleamed behind his deep green eyes. “Not just finding her daughter. Finding and returning all the stolen babies. All the infants a man named Dominic Powers has ordered torn from their dying mothers and then sold to the highest bidder to fund his personal empire.”

      Chapter Three

      He saw on her face that she didn’t know the name. That in spite of the dozens of investigators working in the five states where women had been murdered, Garrett’s hacker sources, with their willingness to use extralegal means, had uncovered a connection that law enforcement hadn’t found—if the feds even knew they were looking at a serial case. Rafe still wasn’t sure exactly how they’d pinpointed Powers, but his sources had come up with enough corroborating evidence to convince him that the unscrupulous attorney was their man.

      “How many do you think you’re looking at?” she asked, her eyes giving away nothing.

      “There have been five that we know of,” he said. “Five similar murders of last-trimester pregnant women.”

      “We’ve come up with eight,” she said. “Most of them in the Gulf Coastal states, though your sister’s death was the only one as far west as Texas. My partner calls them the Madonna Murders—though we’ve managed to keep that away from the press so far, to avoid mass hysteria.”

      “People have the right to know.” Anger speared through him. Lissa might not have had to die if the feds had been willing to alert the public. “They have the right to protect themselves and their loved ones.”

      “It’s a delicate balance,” Shannon admitted, “but that decision came from way above my pay grade.”

      “That’s no excuse,” he murmured.

      “We’ve learned that men driving stolen white vans marked with the names of fictitious plumbing companies were seen leaving at least three of the scenes. But Dominic Powers—that’s a new name to me. What can you СКАЧАТЬ