A Cry In The Dark

“I’m not the enemy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Reader,

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

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

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

Yours,

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Editor

A Cry in the Dark

Jenna Mills

www.millsandboon.co.uk

JENNA MILLS

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

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

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Prologue

The cry ripped through the late-afternoon silence.

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

Violet.

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

“Sweetheart?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Everything okay?”

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

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

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

But deep inside, an innate sense warned otherwise.

The cry drowned out the gentle strains of the lullaby.

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

Samantha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What look?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

The cry stopped him cold.

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

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

But now Mariah was home three hours early.

And he’d heard the cry.

“Honey—” He stopped abruptly, stared.

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

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

She frowned. “That bad?”

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

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

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

“How about a swim?”

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

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

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

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

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

Something was very wrong.

Chapter 1

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

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

Once, she had.

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

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

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

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

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

Because of the man.

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

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

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

Just like they did her brother, Anthony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“About me?”

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

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

Ruth kept dabbing. “A man.”

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

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

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

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

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

Intense, Danielle silently corrected. Striking.

Gone.

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

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

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

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

Except she still felt him. Deeply. Disturbingly.

“You going to get that?” Ruth asked.

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

“Turn around.”

She stiffened. “Come again?”

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

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

“Just do it.”

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

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

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

“Who is this? What do you—”

“I have your son.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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