Mother by Fate

“Not anymore.” That quiet tone again. Every time she opened her mouth it struck him anew. Made him think of a meadow where breezes blew soft and cool.

“Were you married or just engaged?” He already knew that, too, but asked anyway. Because if this meet had been genuine, he’d have asked.

“Married.” The answer didn’t surprise him. The few questions he’d asked in the right places on the street the day before when he’d seen her with his mark had given him what he needed to find the rest on the internet.

“Me, too.” Number one rule in getting information out of someone. You had to give some to get some.

“But not anymore?” He liked the way she was looking at him. Kind of hopeful, as though she wanted him to be single.

Not part of the plan. Her hope. Or him feeling glad that she was hoping.

He sat there in the swim trunks he’d dug out of the laundry after his phone call that morning and quickly washed in the big sink at the kennel, contemplating his next move. The guy he’d hired to watch Sara Havens had interrupted feeding time with his call saying that she’d headed down to the pool in her complex, five miles from where he and Mari lived. Michael had one goal: to find out what he needed to know as quickly as possible. The flirtation was carefully calculated. It wasn’t real.

“Nope, I’m not married anymore,” he said lightly. But for once in his life he was tempted to say more.

He wasn’t the type to bare his soul. Most particularly when it came to talking about Shelley.

“Was the breakup recent?”

“Three years.” The same time she’d been in Santa Raquel. Chosen deliberately for that reason. To give them more in common. In reality, Shelley had been dead for four. Which was why her daughter didn’t remember her.

“Your choice or hers?”

He hated sympathy. Detested it. But wanted to be honest with this woman with her unfussy dark blond hair, no makeup and a body that tempted him like he couldn’t remember ever being tempted.

He watched her. Was she a witch? Doing some kind of voodoo on him?

The thought was preposterous.

So maybe the chance meeting by the pool hadn’t been his best move.

“It was mutual.” Mutual in that neither he nor Shelley had chosen to end their marriage. Neither of them would ever have done so. But this wasn’t about truth. It was about answers.

And it was time to get them.

With his degree in psychology, Michael knew a thing or two about human behavior, body language and how to use interpersonal communication to his favor.

Manipulation, his sisters called it. Of course, they also claimed they were immune to his skills. And were proud of the work he did. The way he used his “gift” as they’d termed it.

His sisters were nuts. Mostly.

“You happy to be back home?” She smiled. And for a brief second, no more than a breath, he wanted that smile to swallow him up.

“Yes,” he told her. The plan had always been to move home when he finished medical school. Shelley, his beautiful, funny, sexy wife, had loved Santa Raquel. She’d loved his garbage-collector father, stay-at-home mother and four younger, nosy sisters, too...

Shelley. He had a job to do.

“What about you?” he asked, determining that he’d spent enough time establishing the parameters of this seemingly chance meeting. He was there to get information. The sooner he did that, the better. “You like Santa Raquel?”

“Very much.”

“So you’ve lived here since your divorce?”

Michael was a hunter of people. Sara Havens was going to lead him to his target.

“Yes,” she said, holding his gaze. Her eyes were blue.

He allowed his eyes to express his appreciation of the woman he was just meeting. Feigning an interest that wasn’t supposed to be real.

He asked her about her favorite restaurants. Pretended that one of the three she named was his favorite, too.

“We’ll have to go sometime,” he said without thinking. What the hell? Conversations didn’t usually get away from him.

“I’d like that.”

“You free tonight?” If not, he could ask where she’d be, with whom, and possibly get what he needed so he could scram.

Her pause gave him hope. That he’d have a dinner date with the first woman who’d made him think twice about sleeping with someone who wasn’t Shelley? Or that she’d give him what he’d come to retrieve?

“Or we could do it another night,” he suggested, rescuing them both.

“Another night might be better.”

Because she was harboring a dangerous criminal? A woman on the run whom bounty hunter Michael Edison was going to catch.

“I’m...uh...possibly working tonight.” She smiled again.

She wanted him to know she wasn’t brushing him off. He wanted inside the door she’d just opened. He’d seen her on the street with his perp the day before. He’d asked around the area—at a thrift shop, a car maintenance garage, a computer repair shop—and finally found a young girl, a shop clerk, who, when he’d described his target, had replied, “Oh, you mean Sara? Sara Havens?”

He’d gotten a name. After which the girl, while still congenial, had clammed up completely in terms of giving him any pertinent information.

Everyone on the block had been that way. They couldn’t have done better if they were trained. Impressive, really, that the general public of Santa Raquel was that aware. Or scary that they had to be.

“What do you do for a living?” Using her lead, Michael turned his conversation in the direction he needed it to go.

His online national reporting service told him Sara Havens was a licensed professional clinical counselor. He knew her address. Her former address. The fact that she’d once gone by the last name Stover and her phone number was unlisted.

“I’m a counselor.” She hesitated, a somewhat tentative expression on her face, as though she expected some kind of negative reaction. On another day he might have been curious.

“A therapist?” She and Nicole Kramer, an unstable and armed felon, could be old friends, he supposed. Ones who hadn’t been in touch for many years. They’d both grown up in LA.

If they were friends, did Sara Havens even know who and what Nicole had become? Sara could be in danger and not even know it.

If he showed his hand to her, and she did know what Nicole was up to, he’d lose his only real lead...

“I...counsel women,” she said slowly, clearly choosing her words.

“Only women?”

“And children.”

“But no men?” He tried for a smile. Maybe to tease her. His mind was too busy assessing what she’d just told him to pull it off. What kinds of counseling services excluded men?

She looked away and then back at him. “I counsel victims of domestic violence.”

His mind played a fast-motion visual of all the people he’d met on the street where he’d seen her the night before. There’d been men about. But a lot of women. Women who’d crossed their arms when he’d approached them, or looked over his shoulder instead of meeting his gaze. He should have noticed then. And would have, if he hadn’t been hell-bent on nabbing Nicole before she got away.

No wonder those women had been so reluctant to give out any information to strangers. They were protecting their own.

“Do you work at a shelter?” he asked.

Her pause this time told him what he needed to know. He could hardly stay still long enough for her to finish her innocuous comment about being part of a high-risk team that included police, medical personnel, parole officers and other professionals. “The team’s sole purpose is to prevent domestic-violence deaths,” she explained, deftly not answering the question he’d asked about her place of employment.

She wasn’t going to tell him where she worked. He no longer needed her to. What a perfect place for a woman on the run to go—a shelter where the personnel were trained to hide and protect.

“I run a shelter for abused animals,” he said, intent that she not become suspicious of him. If she and her people were hiding Nicole, they could all be in danger. If he said anything and they didn’t believe him, if they chose to believe, instead, whatever story Nicole had concocted to get them to take her in, they’d whisk her so far away he’d never find her.

The only way for him to keep all of them safe was to get his job done as quickly as possible. The women and children at a women’s shelter weren’t Nicole’s target. Her own two-year-old son was. But desperate people took desperate measures.

Nicole would be in need of a fix soon. And that would make her desperate.

“A rescue shelter?” she asked, leaning forward, her eyes wide.

“Yes.”

“I... Wow... That’s cool.” She’d been about to say something else.

He could, too. With very little provocation. Talking about the dogs and cats and occasional bird that ended up at the shelter came easily to him. But he was supposed to have just bought a condo in her complex. He couldn’t be living in the little house on several acres he’d bought when he’d brought Mari home to grow up surrounded by family. He stood. “I have to get back to my unpacking,” he said. “But it’s been... I’m Michael Edison, by the way.”

“Sara Havens.”

“I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you.” The truth of his words gave them the power he needed them to have. And maybe there was a bit too much warmth in his gaze to pass for playacting as he added, “About that dinner. I’ll need some way to contact you...”

“I’d give you my number, but I don’t have a pen.” She didn’t offer her unit number. Or ask for his.

“I have a good memory.”

She rattled off her phone number. It hadn’t been listed.

He thanked her.

And tried to forget the smile on her face as he strode the long way from the pool through the complex—to make it look as if he was going back to his unit—and headed to his black SUV, which was sitting in the parking lot closest to the pool.

CHAPTER TWO

SARA SPENT A couple of hours at the pool. Feeling decadent, she slathered herself with oil and enjoyed the way her skin tingled beneath the sun’s warm touch. She closed her eyes but didn’t sleep. Her mind kept jumping between Nicole Kramer and the lithe, muscled man she’d just met whose eyes held secrets.

And sadness.

She didn’t expect him to call.

But kind of hoped he would.

Like Nicole, he was different. He’d caught her attention at a time when she’d needed the distraction.

Stepping into the tiled double walk-in shower in her master bath later that afternoon, Sara pictured him there, as well. He was standing at the slightly taller showerhead next to the one she used, water sluicing over his broad chest...

Sara’s eyes flew open as her phone rang.

On the second peal she dashed for a towel, embarrassed that she’d been having such thoughts...

What if it was him calling?

Every ounce of desire fled as she recognized the number.

With her towel held up to her chest, covering her to just above the knees, she leaned back against the bathroom counter and pushed the answer button. “What do you want, Jason?”

“It’s not for me,” he said quickly. As though that made a difference. Or was any different. “It’s for Bessie.” It always was.

“How much?”

“Three hundred. The art program we sent her to this summer has an after-school program and she really wants to go.”

By “we” he better have meant the two of them. Not him and whatever stripper he had living with him.

“I’m coaching full-time this year, so she’ll have to go to an after-school program of some kind, but I can send her to the free one if you’d rather...”

“I didn’t get my July pictures.”

“I know. I...well...I thought someone had mailed them.”

“And this...someone... She can’t mail pictures but you trust her to take care of a five-year-old child?” She couldn’t say “our” daughter. Because technically, Bessie wasn’t Sara’s. She’d raised her as her own from the second she was born. Her ex-husband had said he’d do the necessary paperwork for Sara to be able to adopt his biological child so they could be a fully legal family, so Sara would have the same parental rights he did.

The adoption was just another thing he’d lied about.

“She’s...not with Bessie and me anymore.” He always spoke faster when he was saying something he knew made him look bad in her eyes. It was how she knew when he was lying to her.

Pathetic, really.

“I’m sending over scans and pics of some of her projects. And July’s photos, too, right now, as we speak,” he said. “She’s got real spatial aptitude. And you know I wouldn’t ask if I had the money to pay for this myself. But being a single father...”

He was a good father. It was the only reason Sara had spent the past three years biting her tongue and sending her money. The alimony she had no choice but to pay. She came from a wealthy family. And had made a poor marriage choice.

Bessie wasn’t at fault for that. And for the first two years of the little girl’s life, Sara had been the little girl’s only mother. She’d thought she would be her forever mother.

“I know the ropes, Jason. You don’t have to repeat your victim’s tale every time we speak.” Yes, she’d left him, drastically downsizing his lifestyle.

But only after she’d caught him cheating on her. More than once.

“It’s wrong that you don’t let me see her.”

“You’re the one who chose to leave us. I don’t want her to get confused with various mothers coming in and out of her life. Or having to choose loyalties...”

He was afraid that if Sara was in Bessie’s life the day would come when Bessie would choose to come to live with Sara.

“When she’s eighteen, she’ll be able to make her own choice,” Sara reminded him.

“She was two when you left. I hardly think she’ll remember you.” The man was stupid, hurting her while asking her for money.

Stupid and smart enough to win, too. He had her over a barrel and he knew it. Her love for Bessie was as unconditional as any mother’s love. She’d give the little girl whatever she needed.

“Just don’t be late with my pictures again,” she said. They were the only way she could watch her little girl grow up.

“I won’t. I am sorry about that,” he said. And she knew he meant it. Just as she knew that every dime she sent for Bessie’s care was spent exactly as she meant it to be spent.

Jason wasn’t going to screw up a good thing. Not for himself, and not for Bessie, either. He truly doted on the little girl.

He didn’t call Sara for the basics. The general child-care things he handled on his own. Just as, while he’d fought for alimony, he’d never asked for child support during their divorce settlement. He was savvy, the jerk she’d married. If he’d made an agreement to accept child support from Sara, she’d have had grounds to argue her right to see the girl.

“I’ll transfer the money by Monday,” she said. They banked at the same institution—Jason’s doing—so that she could make online transfers. She couldn’t take money out of his account. And he couldn’t see hers at all. But she was able to transfer funds to his account at any time.

Her alimony payments went through the court. And unless he married, they would continue to do so for another seven years.

“Thanks, Sara.” Jason’s tone was congenial now. As if they were old friends. All the tension had left his voice. As it always did. No matter how much of a scum he’d just been. Asking for money. Or having sex behind his wife’s back. He was Jason. He was entitled.

“How is she?” Sara asked. He was going to hang up.

“Good. Real good.”

“How did she do with the swimming lessons?”

“It was rough at first. You know how she hates having her head underwater...”

She had at two. That could have changed.

“But in the end, she was swimming like a fish.”

“Underwater?”

“Not as easily, but yeah.”

Sara smiled. Bessie was one determined little girl. She was proud of her.

“So, yeah, I hate to cut you off, but I gotta go, Sara, I have to...”

Sara might have forced him to talk to her a little longer—after all, she hadn’t transferred the money yet—but her phone buzzed with an incoming call.

“I do, too. Bye,” she said to her ex, and clicked over to take the other call.

“Lila, what’s up?” The managing director of the Lemonade Stand, the unique, privately funded women’s shelter where Sara worked, didn’t ever call her at home just to chat. “It’s Nicole. She’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone? She left?” Dropping her towel, Sara reached for the closest pair of cotton pants she had. With the phone propped between her shoulder and her ear, she slipped into underwear and then her pants. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said, buttoning the pants with fingers that fumbled in her haste. “Why would she go? She’s not safe and... She called someone and got word that her son was being moved, didn’t she?”

It was the sole reason the woman would leave the only place where she was safe. Where her secrets were safe.

“She made a call,” Lila confirmed. “But no, she told one of the girls that Toby hadn’t been moved yet.”

There was a neighbor in LA across the street from where Nicole had lived with her husband and son, an older woman Nicole’s ex didn’t even notice, who’d been keeping an eye on things for Nicole. Specifically on her son. Because Trevor, Toby’s father, a white-supremacist higher-up in a national neo-Nazi organization was going to run with him. Nicole knew it. Now the police knew it. And if he did run, the woman would never see her son again. Worse, the boy would have little chance but to be indoctrinated by the man who’d spawned him for one purpose only. To populate the world with white men who hated anyone who wasn’t a white man.

White men who believed that ridding the earth of nonwhites was their God-given purpose.

If Nicole didn’t get Toby away, the boy would most likely grow up to be just like his dad. As Trevor had done before him.

Sara had a bra on and was in the process of pulling a short-sleeved cotton top over her head. “She wouldn’t leave,” she said. “Not without Toby.”

Late the night before, the Santa Raquel police had promised Nicole they’d get her son out of Trevor’s house and into safe custody, after the LA Police Department had withdrawn the warrant that had been issued for her arrest. A child-welfare representative, a member of the High Risk Team, had already been briefed and was waiting for Toby to arrive in Santa Raquel.

“She left,” Lila said, her voice unusually agitated. “She was at the thrift shop, looking for some jeans...” All they’d had in the on-campus store were women’s sizes. Nicole, who was twenty-seven years old and five foot two, barely weighed a hundred pounds. “And then she was gone. Out the side door where we empty the trash...”

The thrift shop, one of the many businesses operated by the Lemonade Stand that were open to the public and provided the shelter’s primary means of support, fronted an open city street. Residents accessed it through a back exit, and from there the only admittance to the locked grounds of the Stand was via fingerprint recognition.

A new safety measure that had been instigated over the summer as part of the work the High Risk Team was doing.

“She got spooked,” Sara said, slipping into a pair of light blue flats, then slinging her bag over her shoulder before heading out the door. “Dammit, someone was there. Someone scared her into running.”

“From what we heard last night, if Trevor gets hold of her she’s as good as dead.”

“And then he has Toby all to himself,” Sara said. “You’ve already alerted everyone...”

“Of course.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Good.”

Sara and Lila, in these jobs they worked together, had seen more ugliness than most people ever would. Lila always appeared to handle it all calmly.

With only the briefest shrug of disappointment about the fact that she wouldn’t have been able to have her dinner date with Hot Pool Guy that night, Sara drove carefully, but over the speed limit to the Lemonade Stand. There wasn’t much she could do at this point, but maybe there would be. Once she talked with some of the women. They might relax and open up to her more easily than they would with a member of law enforcement. Maybe one of them saw something that would give them a clue as to where Nicole had gone.

A direction even.

Regardless, Sara needed to be at the Stand.

Because just as Lila leaned on her, she leaned on Lila, too.

They were two strong women, caring for victims to the best of their ability.

And though they never spoke of their personal lives with each other, they both seemed to understand, without having to say as much, that they were two women with secrets of their own.

CHAPTER THREE

MICHAEL WAS GOOD at what he did. In just a few short years he’d become one of the top ten bounty hunters in the country. And while Michael had bills to pay, he didn’t hunt criminals to make a living. He hunted them strictly to save innocent lives.

He’d brought in the head of a Mexican drug cartel for a sum that would have kept him and Mari clothed and fed for more than a year if he’d chosen to stop working.

A tiny bitch of a woman wasn’t going to get away from him.

She was good, though. Her ex-husband, when he’d gone to the guy to find out what he could about the woman listed on the warrant he’d been given, told him she’d been hunted before.

Trevor Kramer had been only too happy to speak with him—relieved to know that the woman who’d posed a threat to his son’s life was soon going to be behind bars for good.

Michael had been hanging out on the street where he’d spotted her the evening before, after tracing her to a bus stop in Santa Raquel. She’d been with Sara Havens and the two had disappeared before traffic had cleared enough for him to get across the street. He was certain now that someplace close by, but not easily discernible to him, was a women’s shelter that was unknowingly harboring a criminal.

He still didn’t know where the shelter was, but less than an hour after leaving Sara Haven’s condo complex that afternoon, he’d seen Nicole, and their cat-and-mouse game had begun. She’d been inside the thrift shop he’d visited the evening before looking for information on her or Sara. From where he’d been standing out on the street, he’d seen her by a rack of pants. Moving slowly, casually, he’d drawn closer. He’d counted two doors with access to the shop—one on the side, the other in the front. Heading toward the corner of the building, he’d had both covered.

But by some divine timing for her, the woman had shot out the side door at the exact time a delivery truck had pulled into the alley. It had been turning around and she’d been standing on the far side of the bumper, clutching a ring attached to the side of the truck, catching a ride away from him before he’d had a chance to approach her.

He’d lost a precious few minutes getting back to his SUV, but he’d kept the truck in sight. Apparently he’d had a little divine intervention, as well—the big truck was having trouble maneuvering through the crowded city streets. Just as he got close, the truck stopped and the woman on the back jumped off.

He’d swerved into a parking spot and had taken off after her on foot.

They’d been running for more than an hour now. In and out of neighborhoods. Over fences. He’d lose her, and then find her again. Anytime he’d thought she was too tired to go on, she’d disappear on him again.

It didn’t take him long to figure out that she ducked under and behind thick shrubbery to rest.

The third time she tried that trick he had her. She was in a front yard in a quiet neighborhood. It didn’t look like anyone was home. Michael had her cornered.

His paperwork had her listed as armed and dangerous. She’d already taken one shot at a man. Her ex-husband. She’d broken into two homes. And had attempted to steal a baby out of his crib on two different occasions, both times while bearing a loaded gun.