The Coltons of Eden Falls

“Soon as I run it by the boss” came the reply.

“And how long is that going to take?”

He knew things had to progress at their own pace, but he hated the idea of leaving the girl alone with this thug for another moment, much less for another day or two. There was no telling what could happen in that amount of time, and he didn’t want to take any more chances than he had to.

“Anxious?” the other man jeered, enjoying himself. He liked having the upper hand and, in this case, he clearly got to call the shots. “Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. She’ll be ready for you then.”

Just what did that scum mean by “ready”?

A premonition had a shiver zipping down Tate’s back, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about the circumstances. Tate was well aware that if he pressed, if he remotely said that she looked ready now or tried in any way to hurry this along, the whole thing could just fall apart on him. There were steps to take and he knew it.

That didn’t make taking them any easier.

If this was rushed, the people they were after would smell a setup and not just back off but vanish into thin air, taking the young women with them. He’d seen it before.

Hell, he’d been part of it before—having an operation unravel on him that allowed a killer to be set free. The man was ultimately taken down and brought to justice, but not before he’d killed several more young women. Young women who wouldn’t have died if he had done his job right in the first place, Tate thought ruefully.

That wasn’t going to happen again, he vowed. This time, he was going to do things by the book. Even if that meant he had to find a way to physically restrain himself.

“What time tomorrow?” he asked the guard.

“We’ll get back to you about that,” the man told him, affecting a superior attitude.

Tate narrowed his eyes, looking as cold as the man he was dealing with. Colder. “I don’t like being jerked around,” he said in a voice that contained an unspoken warning.

“Nobody’s jerking you around,” the other man promised, sounding more than a little nervous that this encounter could turn physical. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said again, this time far more amiably.

“I’ll look forward to it,” Tate said, not bothering to tone down the note of sarcasm in his voice. He looked from Hannah to the man, wondering if she even realized how breathtakingly beautiful she was. She reminded him of a rose newly in bloom. “In the meantime, I don’t want anyone touching her.”

The other man began to smirk again. “She really got to you, eh?”

Tate was aware that men like the one he was dealing with directly understood only one thing: money. It was the only language they spoke. However, he hadn’t been given the suitcase that was to be filled with the cash he was to trade for Hannah. That came tomorrow.

Whatever cash he had on him at the moment was his own, but it was only paper as far as Tate was concerned. Paper that was capable of buying both him and Hannah a little peace of mind.

Taking out his wallet, Tate removed a hundred-dollar bill. As the other man eagerly put his hand out, Tate tore the bill in half and handed one piece to him.

“What the hell is this?” the man demanded. “Some kind of stupid game?”

“No game,” Tate assured him. “You get the other half of the hundred when I come back tomorrow and see for myself that she’s all right.” His eyes bored into the other man’s dark ones. “We have a deal?”

The other man cursed roundly, then shoved his half of the bill into his pocket. “We have a deal,” he retorted grudgingly.

“Good.” Tate turned on his heel and crossed to the door.

Tate could almost feel Hannah’s eyes watching him as he walked out of the suite.

Tomorrow seemed like an eternity away.

Chapter 2

“Did you see her? Was she there?”

Caleb Troyer fired the anxious questions at him the moment the thirty-one-year-old cabinetmaker walked into the makeshift, satellite FBI office.

Rather than the customary laid-back attitude normally associated with people who came from the Amish community, Caleb reminded him of a rocket that was ready to go off at the slightest provocation.

He couldn’t say that he blamed the man, either.

“Yes, I saw her,” Tate answered.

He glanced toward his sister, who’d come in with Caleb. He sincerely wished that Emma had followed protocol and persuaded Caleb to stay away and let the task force do its work.

Granted, the distraught man was Hannah’s brother as well as Emma’s fiancé. However, Caleb was also a civilian and, in his experience, overzealous, emotionally involved civilians had a way of causing a mission to fall apart.

They couldn’t afford to have that happen. Too many young, innocent lives were at stake. And Tate had absolutely no intention of watching another mission self-destruct on him.

“How did she look?” Caleb pressed. “Have they …” At a loss, Caleb searched for a word that didn’t drag a cat-o’-nine-tails across his soul, making it bleed when he considered the implication. “Have they hurt her in any way?” he finally asked nervously.

Beneath the cabinetmaker’s apparent restlessness was anger. Tate could see it in the other man’s gray eyes. Tall and muscular, Caleb Troyer, once unleashed, would be a force to be reckoned with. Not that he could honestly blame Caleb for what he was feeling. If all went well, maybe Caleb would get his chance at some payback when the operation was over.

But until then, the man had to be restrained.

“She looks tired and frightened,” Tate told Hannah’s brother.

His response was true—as far it went. What Tate didn’t add was that when he’d initially seen Hannah in the motel room with the other two girls—before he’d been given the DVD to watch, she’d appeared to be drugged, as were the other girls. It was the easiest way to control the “inventory” and keep them from escaping.

Caleb definitely didn’t need to know that. If he did, that might provide the missing ingredient that would set Hannah’s brother off and God knew that Tate had more than enough to deal with without having to worry about the father of three suddenly going ballistic on him.

He could just picture Caleb storming into the motel room, breaking down the door and subsequently getting shot for his efforts. If that happened, he’d have another body on his hands—as well as his conscience—and his sister to deal with.

Omitting certain details was the far safer way to go in this case.

“If you know where she is, then what are we waiting for?” Caleb demanded impatiently. He looked from Emma to Tate, searching for a glimmer of support. Why were they hanging back? “Let’s go get Hannah and the other girls,” he urged.

Turning on his heel, he was almost at the office door when Tate moved in front of him, blocking his way.

Tate completely sympathized with what the other man had to be going through, but what Caleb was proposing almost guaranteed a bloodbath.

“We can’t just burst in there,” he told Caleb as calmly as possible.

“Why not? Why can’t we just walk into the place?” Caleb wanted to know. He didn’t understand why this detective who’d promised to bring his sister and the other girls back was acting so reticent. Was he going back on his word? “You said there were just two godless thugs guarding the girls. There are three of us here—and you can get more,” he pointed out.

Caleb was obviously focused only on rescuing Hannah at all costs. He didn’t blame the man. But Tate was able to take several different points of view regarding the op besides the way Caleb did.

Tate did his best to make the other man understand. “Yes, I can get more manpower and maybe we could rescue Hannah and the other two without incident,” he allowed, deliberately not going into how dangerous that sort of overt action could be. “But we also want to be able to rescue whatever other girls the ring has hidden away—the girls who were kidnapped for the same reason that your sister was taken. And we won’t be able to do that if the guy who’s the brains behind all this gets wind of what happened.

“The minute he does,” Tate continued, “he’ll go underground and those girls will be as good as dead. We’ll never find them.” Tate took a breath, searching the other man’s face to see if his words had sunk in. Wondering if Caleb suspected that he was also lecturing himself as well as the victim’s brother.

Lecturing himself because Tate had the exact same reaction, the exact desire as Caleb. He wanted to save Hannah and the girls with her as soon as possible. For two cents, he’d go in, guns blazing, and take down those two worthless pieces of trash guarding the girls with no more regret than he experienced stepping on a colony of ants.

Less.

The only problem was, right now there were only two henchmen visible and he knew damn well that there had to be more thugs involved than just Tweedledum and Tweedledee. An operation this big didn’t function with just two flunkies.

There had to be more.

He put his hand on the Amish cabinetmaker’s shoulder and looked at him compassionately.

“I know it’s hard, but you’re going to have to be patient,” he told Caleb. “It’s the only way we’re going to be able to successfully rescue those girls. All of them,” he emphasized.

Caleb nodded. It was obvious that he was struggling with himself. “You are right. We cannot just go in and rescue Hannah, not when there are other girls being held prisoner as well.” And then he sighed and shook his head. “But this is hard,” he complained.

Caleb would get no argument from him. “Nobody ever said it wouldn’t be,” Tate agreed. He looked at his watch. The handler should be getting the money right about now.

It was the handler whose job it was to pick up the funds from Gunnar that were needed for the exchange. At least that part was easy. Securing the funds would have been a great deal more difficult if he didn’t have a billionaire brother who was willing to bring down this sex trafficking ring.

“So what’s your next move?” Emma asked her brother as Caleb retreated to the far side of the room. There was tension in her voice.

“I’ve set up a private one-on-one session with Hannah,” he told Emma. “Seems my credentials are so good that the man at the top is allowing me to have a private ‘preview’ with my future ‘purchase.’ I’m going to try to convince Hannah to trust me, but it’s not going to be easy, given what she’s been through.”

Overhearing, Caleb looked up, suddenly alert. “Call her Blue Bird.”

Tate exchanged quizzical looks with Emma. “What?” Tate asked.

“Call her Blue Bird,” Caleb repeated, crossing back to them. “It was a nickname I gave Hannah when she was a little girl. She was always running around, fluttering about here and there, so full of life, of energy. One day when she seemed 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 ordered around like that in front of a relative stranger, but he was also obviously afraid to oppose the larger man. Muttering under his breath, the man with the mousy goatee went to the back of the suite, threw open the door leading into the bedroom and barked “Get out here” to the lone occupant in the bedroom.

A moment later, Hannah, her flame-red hair piled up high on her head, wearing a green gown that looked painted on, delicately glided into the sitting room.

Each time he saw her, Tate couldn’t help thinking, she seemed even more beautiful than the last time. It almost made his soul ache to look at her, knowing what she had to have gone through. Was still going through, he amended.

He had a gut feeling that Hannah was tougher than she looked. He sincerely hoped so, for her sake.

“Satisfied?” the African-American barked, flinging his hand out and gesturing toward Hannah.

Tate withdrew his hand from the briefcase’s lid. “Satisfied,” he replied. Tate took a step back from the table. He smiled and nodded at Hannah before turning his attention to the man he’d made his bargain with the day before. Tate looked into his eyes, his gaze turning almost hypnotic. “And nobody touched her.” It was both a question and a statement that waited to be confirmed.

“Nobody laid a damn finger on her—or anything else for that matter,” the man with the goatee added when it was obvious that the client was waiting for more of a confirmation.

Tate looked at Hannah, who kept her gaze lowered, looking down at the rug. With the crook of his finger beneath her chin, he raised her head until she was looking directly at him.

“Is that true?” he asked her.

Surprised at being addressed directly without any curse words attached, a beat still passed before Hannah nodded her head.

“What are you asking her for?” the goatee demanded to know. “I said nobody touched her. I lived up to my half of the bargain,” he declared impatiently. “Where’s my money?”

“Right here,” Tate said, placing the other half of the torn bill into the man’s outstretched hand.

“What’s that for?” Waterford wanted to know, eyeing the single torn section suspiciously.

“Insurance,” was the unselfconscious reply. “Now I’d like some time alone with the girl.”

“Sure, knock yourself out.” The man with the goatee gestured toward the bedroom. “You paid for her, have at it,” he urged, and then he leered, “Sure you don’t want me to break her in for you?”

It was a crude play on words. Words that quickly faded away in the heat of the glare that had entered Tate’s eyes.

“What I want,” he began deliberately, “is for the two of you to make yourself scarce.” Tate looked from one man to the other. Neither seemed to grasp what he was telling them, or made any attempt to leave the room. “You can stand guard in the hall outside the suite’s door if it makes you happy.”

“We’re not leaving,” the goatee growled.

“I’m not telling you to leave,” Tate countered. “I’m telling you I want some privacy. There’s only one way out of this suite and it’s through that door.” He deliberately pointed to it. “You can both stand guard in front of it, or take turns—I really don’t care which you decide to do. But I don’t want to feel crowded while I look over what a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills just got me. Understand?” he demanded.

Waterford shook his head. “I don’t know about this,” he said skeptically.

“You’re not leaving the hotel, just the room,” Tate argued. “We’ll still be right where you left us when you walk back in,” he assured them, adding in a voice that brooked no nonsense, “Those are my terms. If you don’t like them—” he made a move to reclaim the briefcase, his implication clear: he either got his way, or he would be on his way.

The choice was theirs.

The man with the goatee cursed roundly, adding a few disparaging words about having to put up with aggravating people.

In the end, he grudgingly said, “Okay, we’ll be out in the hallway in front of the door. Right in front of the door,” he emphasized. “So don’t get any big ideas about making a break for it.”

Tate deliberately looked at Hannah. “I assure you, any ideas I have have nothing remotely to do with the hotel door.”

The men didn’t look completely convinced, but they walked out of the suite. Once on the other side of the door, they made enough noise that just barely stopped short of waking the dead.

It was to let him know that they were right outside the door, as specified. Ready to stop him if he had any plans to escape with the girl.

Tate frowned. He didn’t have time to think about those clowns right now. It was Hannah who commanded all his attention.

When he turned around to face her, he saw the fear in her eyes.

The real work, he knew, was still ahead of him.

Chapter 3

Finding herself alone with the stranger, Hannah did her best not to give in to the fear that had been her constant unwelcome companion since this terrible nightmare had begun.

It wasn’t as if this man she was looking at was like the others she’d encountered in this world of outsiders. He seemed different than the two crude, insulting men who were in charge of keeping watch over her and the other girls who’d been abducted from her village and Ohio. Different even than Solomon Miller, a man who her small community had once turned out and who’d sought to avenge himself by throwing his lot in with the men who’d abducted her and the others.

This man she was with seemed different, Hannah silently reminded herself, but even she knew that appearances could be deceiving and she hadn’t known even a moment’s kindness since she’d been torn away from everything she knew and loved.

So why did she feel that this man somehow was different?

The tips of her fingers felt like ice. Her whole body felt as if it was alternating between hot and cold as she struggled to keep fear from rampaging through her like a runaway wild animal.

What was this man going to do to her?

And how could she stop him? He looked so much more powerful than she was.

Her brain was still foggy from whatever it was that the man with the facial hair had tried to force her to swallow earlier. Foggy, but not completely useless because she’d managed to keep the drug hidden in the corner of her mouth, between the inside of her lip and her gum. Still, some of it had leached into her system. But she’d heard enough to piece things together.