The Coltons of Eden Falls

Even so, she couldn’t really believe it. Didn’t want to believe what she’d heard through the door that separated this new, fancy prison from the outer room where her jailers had sat, talking to the man who was now towering over her.

Had she actually been sold to him?

It didn’t seem possible.

People weren’t sold to other people. Things like that had taken place during a far more barbaric time, a shameful passage in the country’s history that was mercifully a century and a half behind them.

People didn’t buy people anymore. They didn’t.

And yet …

And yet, she’d seen the briefcase before the lid had come down on it. There’d been money in that case. A great deal of money. Was that being exchanged for her?

Had this man really bought her?

What did that mean?

Hannah could feel her soul seizing up within her as the fear she’d been trying so desperately to contain suddenly broke out of its confines and all but paralyzed her.

Maybe this was all just a horrible, horrible dream. A nightmare. And maybe, dear Lord, if she just closed her eyes, when she opened them again, she’d be back in her safe little house with her family around her. What she wouldn’t give to hear the voices of her nieces, Katie, Ruthie and Grace—her brother Caleb’s daughters—raised in some silly little inconsequential squabble.

Tears rose in Hannah’s eyes and she fought to keep them back. She couldn’t cry in front of this man, couldn’t risk it. She’d seen the effect that tears had on these cruel beasts who’d ripped her world apart. Mary Yoder had cried and they’d beaten her for it, seeing tears as a sign of weakness.

She had no idea where Mary was now, or even if she was still alive.

These men who had become an unwanted daily part of her life had no respect for weakness, no compassion or even pity. They had nothing but contempt for its display, and if anything, when they encountered weakness, it just made them crueler.

She had to be strong, Hannah told herself. Only the strong survived and she needed to survive, needed to find a way to get back to her family again, back to Caleb, who needed her to help him take care of his motherless daughters.

Be strong, Hannah, be strong, she silently urged herself. He knows Caleb. That has to mean something.

Somehow, digging deep, Hannah found the strength she was looking for. Found it and clung to it for all she was worth.

Raising her head, she forced herself to look into the tall, imposing stranger’s eyes. They didn’t look like the eyes of a cruel man. Perhaps she could talk him out of this shameful thing he was about to do.

“Please,” she implored him. “You don’t want to do this.” Hannah took a deep breath, willing her nerves to remain steady. She congratulated herself on speaking without allowing a telltale tremor to emerge in her voice and betray her.

Her eyes remained fixed on the stranger’s. Taking another breath, she repeated the sentence, her voice sounding a little stronger this time. “You don’t want to do this.”

The trouble was, God help him, he did, Tate thought. It wasn’t that the undercover role he was playing had gotten to him. He found everything about this persona loathsome. Anyone who preyed on helpless girls, using money and connections to satisfy his unnatural lusts, was nothing short of despicable.

But the truth of it was, since the very first time he’d seen her face on that DVD recording that had contained a virtual catalog of innocence for would-be bidders to view, he’d found himself almost hopelessly attracted to the abducted young woman.

It didn’t matter. He knew he couldn’t do anything about it. Knew that to act in any way on these feelings under the pretext of playing his part was more than reprehensible. His sense of honor, or decency, wouldn’t allow it.

But he couldn’t be anything less than honest with himself and, the thing of it was, under different circumstances, he would have attempted to find a way to at least strike up a conversation with Hannah. Hopefully, that would lead to spending time with her and then perhaps …

Perhaps what? She was just twenty—and he wasn’t. And hadn’t been for a long time.

Besides, he reminded himself pointedly, under any other circumstances, your paths wouldn’t have even crossed.

And it was true. When would a career detective have any occasion to meet a sheltered young woman who spent her whole life entrenched in the bosom of her close-knit Amish community? The answer to that was simple: never.

The tension in the room was so thick, he could almost see it. Somehow, he had to put Hannah at ease, make her relax a little by convincing her that he was not the enemy.

Tate took a step toward her and saw Hannah instinctively shrink back. The very action made him feel terrible for her.

I’m your friend, Hannah. Your friend.

But how did he get her to believe that? Especially since this room was undoubtedly bugged and probably under the ring’s surveillance?

“Have they hurt you?” Tate asked her gently.

The young woman slowly moved her head from side to side, never taking her eyes off him, as if she was afraid that if she looked away, he would take the opportunity to jump her. It was painfully clear that she didn’t trust him to maintain the small distance between them.

If she didn’t trust him when it came to something so basic, how was he going to get her to trust him enough to tell him what he needed to know?

And then he recalled the nickname Caleb had told him to use. It was worth a try.

“You can tell me,” he coaxed. “Did they hurt you, Blue Bird?” His voice deliberately dropped as he called her by the nickname.

Her gray-blue eyes widened and he heard Hannah’s sharp intake of breath. She continued watching him as if she didn’t know what to expect.

“Not since the last time you came,” she finally replied, speaking so quietly that, had he not been looking at her lips, he wouldn’t have even known that she’d answered.

So, the torn bill had worked, he thought. He didn’t kid himself that the guard he’d given it to had any sense of honor, only greed, but that was all right. He wasn’t above using whatever worked.

“But before then?” he pressed.

The small, perfect shoulders rose slightly and then lowered in an almost imperceptible shrug. The clinging green gown rustled a little.

“Before then,” she murmured.

“Who?” he asked, moving closer to her.

Tate saw the young woman automatically shrink into herself again, but this time, she didn’t step back the way she had before. This time, she remained where she was.

“The one with the scraggly hairs on his chin,” she told him.

The man with the goatee, Tate thought. Of the two henchmen, he looked like the more dangerous one, the more unpredictable one.

“Did he hurt you … badly?” Tate pressed, unable to make himself ask Hannah if the scum had actually raped her.

Somehow, phrasing it that directly seemed to just intensify the horror of the attack. He didn’t want to resurrect painful memories for her, he just needed information.

To his relief, Hannah shook her head. “No, not badly.” She knew what he was asking her. Uncomfortable, she pressed her lips together, testing each word cautiously as she uttered it. Her eyes were once again riveted on his face as she watched his reaction. “He tried, but the other man—” What was it that she’d heard the dark-skinned man called? “Nathan,” she suddenly remembered. “Nathan pulled him off me and hit him. Nathan said that no one would pay for me if I was ruined.” She raised her head, a glimmer of defiance in her eyes, as if these were odds she’d managed somehow to beat. “You paid for me.”

Tate paused. He had no doubt that there was probably a camera in the suite somewhere—possibly several—watching his every move, recording his every word. Anything he wanted to convey to her would have to be almost inaudible if he wanted to have a prayer of getting out of here alive—and ever coming back to rescue the girls.

“Yes,” he answered. “I paid for you. Or at least made a partial payment,” he qualified. The rest he was to bring to the “party” that was being given. A party where he and other so-called pillars of society were to be coupled with their bought-and-paid-for virgins.

A party that, rumor had it, the mastermind behind this ring was also to attend.

She didn’t quite follow him. A partial payment? “So do you own me?” she asked, still unable to grasp the concept, even as she heard herself ask the question.

“I will as soon as I make the second payment,” he corrected her, playing to whatever audience would eventually be sitting on the other side of the camera and observing this.

Hannah paused, her head spinning. The conversation didn’t seem real to her, like something in one of the books that were forbidden for her and young people like her in the village to read.

“And when you make that second payment,” she finally said, “then what?”

“Then you’re mine,” he said as matter-of-factly as he could. He saw another glimmer of defiance in her eyes before it faded away again.

Good for you, Tate thought, pleased. They hadn’t broken her spirit. This meant he had something to work with. And that, hopefully, would help her get back to normal once he brought her back to her village.

Watching him intently, Hannah was frantically searching for something to cling to, something to give her hope that there would be an end to this nightmare and that the end she was seeking wasn’t tied to her demise.

There had to be more to this than what there was on the surface.

There had to be, she silently insisted.

“Why did you call me what you did earlier?” she wanted to know, focusing on the name the stranger had used. How could he have possibly known she’d been called that as a child?

Unless …

Unless he had actually spoken to Caleb. Had Caleb sent him, as the man had claimed? It didn’t seem possible. Caleb wouldn’t have left Paradise and walked among the outsiders—

He would. For me, she realized and knew it was true. Hannah looked at the stranger expectantly, waiting for an answer. Then, in case he’d forgotten what she’d asked, she said, “You called me Blue Bird.”

“Blue Birds look pretty against the sky when they soar,” he said evasively, doing his best to recall exactly how Caleb had explained the reason for the nickname to him. “It just seemed to fit you,” he concluded, looking at her pointedly.

Willing her to make the connection between the nickname and what he’d whispered to her the last time he’d seen her.

Had she heard him then?

Or had she been too drugged or too despondent at the time to understand what he was saying to her?

Tate watched the young woman’s face for some sort of clue. Unlike his own stoic expression—his “game” face—Tate saw a myriad of emotions wash over Hannah’s heart-shaped face.

And then, he could have sworn that what looked like enlightenment entered her eyes—just before she shut down again. Shut down as if she was afraid to believe him. Afraid to get her hopes up, for fear that she was only going to have them dashed again.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” he said to her as gently as he dared. “I’m not going to do anything to you. I just want to talk.”

“Talk?” she echoed, as if she didn’t understand the word. As if it was just too much for her to hope for.

“Talk,” he repeated. “I want to get to know you.”

She still looked as if she didn’t comprehend the word, or at least was confused by it. “They said …” The words felt as if they had gotten stuck in her throat and she tried again. “They said I should be ‘nice’ to you.”

There was no mistaking what the euphemism actually meant, though she refused to think about it.

“Who’s they?” Tate asked, doing his best not to put any undue emphasis on the question. He wanted it to sound like nothing more than an idle query, one of many that could crop up in the course of a conversation. “Do you mean the two men outside the door?” he asked, trying to get her to talk to him.

She shook her head. “No, another man. I’d never seen him before. He and the man with him said if I wasn’t nice to you, I’d be sorry.” Either way, she lost, Hannah thought.

Picking up the slender thread, Tate continued, doing his best to sound almost uninterested, just mildly curious. “This man you didn’t know, did you hear anyone address him by name?”

But Hannah shook her head again. “They just called him ‘Boss,’” she told him.

Jackpot!

Kind of.

Subduing his excitement, Tate lowered his voice and asked, “What did he look like?”

Instead of answering him, Tate saw apprehension return to her eyes as she looked at him nervously. “You are trying to trick me.” It was half a question, half a statement.

“Trick you?” he echoed in surprise. Why would she think that?

“Yes,” Hannah insisted. “You are here. He is the man who arranges these things. You must know what he looks like.” Suspicion rose in her voice. Was he trying to trap her somehow? She didn’t understand any of this, not the abduction, not why she had to be here, nothing. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“I’m not trying to trick you,” he assured her gently. “And the only men that I’ve dealt with are those two gorillas outside in the hall. Them, and that man I first spoke to on the telephone,” he added.

The first step in the operation had been finding the website. The one that had advertised “a cleaning service that will leave you swearing that you’ve never been serviced so well in your life.” It had fairly screamed sex trafficking. Tate was almost certain that the voice he’d heard when he dialed the number had belonged to the man in charge. And that that man wasn’t just some ingenious nobody off the street. Rumors and suspicions pointed to the head man being someone high up, not just on this food chain, but on the social food chain as well.

Someone with dark secrets and a darker soul, who satisfied perversions that made anything Tate had previously come up against seem almost docile and childlike by comparison.

Tate looked down into Hannah’s face. Right now, she was the closest he’d gotten to this sex trafficking ring. She might even unknowingly hold the key to taking it down. He needed to find out what she knew. The only way to do that was to talk to her. But he needed to make certain that he wasn’t overheard; otherwise, the op fell apart and the whole ring could just disappear into the night, taking the girls with it—or, if that was too much trouble, leaving behind their lifeless bodies. He had a feeling that it could go either way, and that was a risk he wasn’t about to take.

Debating what to do, after a beat Tate took her hand in his and led her over to the sofa. It was obvious that she followed him reluctantly, but he could work with that, he told himself.

When he turned to look at her, the apprehensive expression he saw on Hannah’s face almost tore him apart. He’d always thought of himself as a protector, a man women felt safe with. To see himself reflected as a potential monster in Hannah’s eyes was a startling revelation. But there was no other way he could interpret what he saw. Hannah looked as if she was holding her breath, waiting for something terrible to happen to her.

Tate forced himself to continue. He was her only chance at survival—he had to remember that. Sitting down, Tate tugged lightly on her hand. When she looked at him quizzically, he coaxed, “Come sit on my lap.”

Her mouth went completely dry.

Was this how it was to begin? The destruction of her virginity—was it going to start with a softly spoken invitation, only to escalate to unspeakable behavior?

She wanted to run.

And yet, she knew she had no choice. Nathan and the other man were just outside the door. She wouldn’t make it past the threshold. And she didn’t want to die the way her friends had. She wanted to live. To live and someday find a way to escape.

So, when the man who had paid for her tugged on her hand again, Hannah willed her knees to bend and did what he bade her to.

She sat down on his lap.

She was trembling, Tate realized the moment she made contact with his lap. He could feel her trembling and hated the fact that she was afraid of him.

Hated this whole charade.

But he knew it was the only way to save Hannah and all the other girls who had been so viciously snatched away from their families, not to mention everything they knew. And their only sin was that they were all so innocent in a world where innocence had ceased to be a common thing and was now a rarity, something to be elevated and observed, like a perfectly cut diamond.

He had no choice but to continue playing this role he had swiftly come to despise.

Tate slipped one arm around her waist, holding Hannah against him. Inclining his head, he began to slowly kiss the nape of her neck.

He struggled to keep from immersing himself in the scent, the feel, the taste, of her.

It’s a part—you’re just playing a part, he silently insisted as he lectured himself over and over again not to get caught up in what he was doing.

Despite everything, despite his desperate attempt to keep a tight rein on himself, Tate could feel his body responding to Hannah. Responding to the intoxicating, sweet taste of her skin against his lips.

Dammit, get a grip, Colton. You’re supposed to be here to rescue her, not ravage her or scare the poor girl to death. She’s not your private playground.

Satisfied that he had performed as expected for whatever camera or cameras hidden in the room for the sole purpose of observing his every move, Tate whispered the same message into Hannah’s ear that he’d told her yesterday.

Except that he embellished on it.

“My name is Tate. Caleb sent me. He was the one who told me to call you Blue Bird so that you’d know I was telling you the truth. I’m here to rescue you,” he told her, his arms tightening just a touch around her waist to prevent any sudden moves on her part, motivated by surprise.

He couldn’t let his guard down, not even for a moment. “You and the others,” he added. His breath feathered along the side of her neck as he spoke. “But this isn’t going to be easy and I’m going to need your help to pull it off.”

Hannah turned her head slowly to look at him. He could tell by the look in her eyes that he’d made a breakthrough.

She was finally beginning to believe him.

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