Capturing the Commando

In the more than twelve hours since her capture, they could have crossed state lines twice or even three times. Though she knew they’d made at least one stop, she had no idea how long they had stayed off the roads—or how they could have possibly avoided what must have been a massive law enforcement effort to locate and rescue her.

In the distance she saw lights, the dark towers of buildings stacked before a gray-blue blur. The ocean? Gulf? Could this mean they were still somewhere in Florida?

“Little beach community, not too far from Palm Beach,” he said, confirming her suspicion. “Think of this as a vacation.”

“Real funny,” she shot back. “And here I’d pegged you for a cowboy, not a clown.”

“I’m neither,” Rafe said roughly. “Just a man looking to find out what happened to the only blood family he has left on this planet—and why someone would butcher my little sister like she was nothing. No one.”

Empathy stirred Shannon’s heart as she heard the desperate grief behind his anger. Enough grief and desperation to throw away his career, his very freedom, to save his sister’s child.

“You could drop this right now,” Shannon said. “Before somebody really gets hurt. People—even your superiors—aren’t without compassion for your situation, and you can bet the FBI and more local agencies than you can shake a stick at are all committed to the search for your niece and your sister’s killers. If you’ll let me, Lyons—Rafe— I could get you a good deal, maybe even keep you out of prison so you can see that baby when we find her. Be the kind of uncle she can count on to help raise her.”

If we find her alive. Though the pair believed to have murdered Lissa Smith was suspected in other similar crimes, none of the missing babies had ever been recovered, and the purpose of their abduction remained a mystery. Black-market trafficking? Blood rituals? The possibilities were endless, each one more sickening than the last.

“Listen to her, Rafe,” Garrett urged, a note of pleading in his voice. “It can’t hurt to listen to what she says.”

The vehicle, which she’d decided was a midsize SUV of some sort, slowed to make a left turn beside a faded sign that read The Seashell Motel—Your Home Away from Home Since 1957. Behind it lay a long one-story structure, a single bar of back-to-back rooms squatting on the far side of a tiny, ill-lit pool. A very few vehicles, all of them older models, offered evidence that this mom-and-pop enterprise was barely clinging to life—a far cry from the luxury hotels she would have expected in this area.

“I have no intention of listening to a word of Agent Brandt’s deal,” Rafe said firmly, clearly used to pulling rank on others. “I brought her here for one reason and one reason only. To talk her into mine.”

“What about your career?” According to Shannon’s research, the thirty-two-year-old had little else. No steady girlfriend, no other family, and few friends beyond the members of his tight-knit Ranger unit, which had its home base in Georgia. Other than the accent, he’d left behind his West Texas past, including the rodeo bull riding circuit, where he’d competed in his youth.

He was one cowboy who’d traded in his hat—along with his heart and soul and loyalty—for a U.S. Army Ranger beret and the unique camaraderie of Special Operations.

Desperate to leverage that bond, she added, “Those Rangers—they’re your family, too, right? You’re just going to bail on them in wartime?”

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 tell me about him?”

“Forty-six years old, Caucasian. Currently renting a thirteen-point-six-million-dollar villa right down the road in Palm Beach after twenty years in Houston.”

Her lips parted as her brows rose. “Thirteen-point-six?”

He nodded to confirm what he and Garrett had discovered from the tax rolls. “Married three times,” Rafe continued. “The most recent spouse filed for divorce and pressed charges for domestic battery. Wife number two vanished a few years prior. Powers claims she ran off with a boyfriend, while her family swears she’d never leave, much less stay away, without a word to them.”

“How’d number one get off so easy?”

Rafe shook his head, then shrugged. “We weren’t able to find any trace, so for all we know, she’s stuffed in a barrel somewhere offshore.”

Shaking her head, Shannon blew out a long breath. “So how’d this charmer end up in the black-market baby business? I don’t suppose it was his compassion for childless families.”

“His passion for the good life is more like it. He tended to pick wives with money and made sure a good chunk of it stayed with him, even when they didn’t.”

“Tends to happen that way when the spouse takes off for parts unknown. Or conveniently drops dead.”

Rafe nodded. “He seems to like the trappings. Flashy women, flashy lifestyle. Speedboats, sports cars, prestige ZIP codes—a hell of a lot more than he could afford on what he made as a family law attorney back in Texas. Maybe it turned out to be even more than he could fund with the occasional disappearing rich wife.”

“Family law…” In spite of what she’d been through and how she must be feeling, Shannon’s gaze was focused, her expression razor-sharp. “So he would have dealt with adoption cases back in Houston, right?”

“He had an office on the edge of River Oaks,” Rafe confirmed. “So I imagine he saw plenty of wealthy families desperate for a shortcut to claiming a healthy, white newborn they could call their own. And very, very grateful when he could make their dreams come true, no matter how he did it.”

“Then at some point a lightbulb comes on…”

Shannon’s handcuffs jingled as she snapped her fingers “…and Powers decides he’s looking at an unmet, extremely strong consumer demand. And who is he to deny the market?”

“He’s a dead man, that’s who he is,” Rafe vowed as he thought of Lissa, the pounding of his own pulse a war drum in his ears. The need for vengeance roared past the grief that had ripped him open. His heart had gone missing, along with his capacity for mercy.

“I thought you were only out to save your niece,” Shannon countered, but the words had no heat in them. And her slight smile said she understood, hinted that she wouldn’t argue with any outcome that left Powers and his men dead—or at least she wouldn’t protest too stringently. “Your niece and those other babies.”

“If I have to choose between revenge and getting them out,” he said, “I won’t have to think about my decision for a second. But if I get my shot at Powers or those butchers he sent for my sister…”

“A man could be forgiven for taking whatever measures necessary to free a captive family member, or even other innocents,” Shannon advised him, “but when it comes to a cold-blooded revenge killing, all bets are off, Captain. You know that as well as I do.”

Rafe drew a deep breath to clear his head, then answered, “I’m not a man looking for forgiveness. I’ve come way too far to give a damn about that. All I care about is making this work. After that, the Army, the FBI, the cops—they can all pick at my bones or whatever else is left of me.”

She had no answer except to look at him, her gaze as reproachful as it was somber. Could she—the same woman he’d shocked and abducted—be feeling some measure of compassion for him, along with the victims of Powers’s crimes?

Rafe didn’t need and certainly didn’t want her pity, so he hurried to fill the space with an explanation of the operation he had come up with, a raid that would stand only a ghost of a chance—and then only if she would agree to help him.

Shannon leaned forward, listening intently, her blue eyes lasering straight through his bravado to focus on the risks inherent in the plan.

When he had finished, she shook her head. “That’s crazy. You know that, don’t you? Why not just let the feds conduct the raid? We have the people and the training. We can assemble…” A shadow passed over her beautiful features, troubling her expression. “We can… I can order the tactical teams and SWAT departments to breach those walls and get—inside.”

When she paled, he suspected she was thinking of the Iowa cigar store standoff he’d researched online after Garrett had determined his “informant’s” true identity. He saw in her eyes that she was haunted by the two women and the new father who had died in the wake of her miscalculation. An error based on the best intelligence she’d had at the time.

From his own experience in combat, he knew civilians sometimes became casualties despite every effort to minimize that risk. He recognized, too, the look of PTSD, the post-traumatic stress disorder he saw written in her blue eyes.

But he pretended not to see it, respecting his promise not to bring up the incident. Instead he zeroed in on his real concern. “What do you think the odds are of the feds taking my information—data illegally obtained by Garrett’s hacker buddies—as gospel and running with it before another woman dies?”

“We’d make it top priority, but you’re right, there would have to be independent, legally obtained confirmation. For the search warrant, among other things—”

“And,” he added, “you’d also have a hell of a lot of interdepartmental chest-thumping as all the various bureaucracies fought for jurisdiction and wrangled over who got to take the credit.”

She opened her mouth as if to argue, then very slowly let it close before nodding. “Even if I were crazy enough to agree to take part in this lunacy,” she began, “do you honestly think a force of three has a prayer of pulling this off without getting a bunch of people killed? Starting with us, I mean.”

“I’ve come back from riskier missions,” he told her. “And run more than a few of ’em myself.”

“With men you trusted?”

“With my life.”

“Yeah, well, this time,” she said, “you’d have exactly two on your team. A woman whose career is toast if she doesn’t betray you, and a techno-nerd brother-in-law who—no offense—looks like he couldn’t fight his way out of buying siding from a determined telemarketer. Do you really imagine you can rely on us?”

“It’s a chance I’m willing to take.”

“For what, Rafe? Because I can’t begin to imagine that a guy like Dominic Powers is keeping a bunch of infants stockpiled at his swanky Palm Beach hacienda. Can you?”

“There’ll be records of where they’ve gone. Who’s adopted those kids. Somewhere. I have a source that mentioned some kind of ledger he keeps close at hand. He takes it out of his wall safe every morning.”

“And you think it’s his client list, maybe even records related to the babies’ mothers?”

“That’s exactly what we’re hoping.”

“Is that another risk you’re willing to take? There sure seem to be a lot of them.”

“I’ll find some way to do this,” he swore through gritted teeth. “With or without your help.”

She shook her head. “You’re not the only one who knows a bluff when she hears one. You wouldn’t have risked snatching me off a crowded street if you thought you had a shot without me. But before you risk both our lives on some half-baked raid against what you and I both know will be a well-fortified, heavily guarded compound, there’s something you should know. Some information I have that your amateur-hour investigation didn’t turn up.”

Though he bristled at being called an amateur—especially considering how he’d caught her off-guard earlier that day—Rafe clamped his jaw shut to hear out what she had to say.

Would it be another lie, like those she’d spun online in her bid to snare him, or was it possible she might be seriously considering helping him?

TIME TO TREAD CAREFULLY, Shannon warned herself as apprehension knotted in the hollow of her stomach.

Nothing she did, nothing she said, during this crisis could be more dangerous than the news she had to give him. Unwelcome news that might easily spark the ugliest of reactions in a man who had already crossed so many lines.

But however many laws he had shattered, however many oaths and regulations he had sacrificed, she still sensed a core of honor in him. A set of rigid values he placed above all bureaucratic rules.

Here’s hoping that not punching a woman is part of that code. After reinforcing her courage with a deep breath, she lobbed her opening volley. “It’s about your sister’s husband, Garrett.”

Rafe snorted in disgust, contempt written in his green eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try that divide-and-conquer bullshit on me, too.”

She leaned slightly forward, determined to cut through his distrust. “Listen to me, Lyons. Your brother-in-law… We think he’s had a girlfriend, a lover, these past six months. A woman he met online and—”

When Rafe jumped to his feet, she jerked back, then cursed herself for reacting. For showing she’d been physically intimidated, when all he was doing was getting up to pace the room.

Yet she couldn’t force herself to relax, for there was nothing safe about the wild energy crackling through his muscles, or the warning, low as a growl, in his voice when he spoke.

“Don’t you dare sit there and try to play me,” he said. “Don’t imagine for a minute I’m that stupid.”

She sat back, scarcely breathing, waiting for his anger to wind down. But he was only getting started, his temper revving to the red zone.

“Do you know Garrett was the one who found her?” Rafe demanded. “Can you imagine what it did to him, a guy like that, who’s worked in nice clean offices his whole life and doesn’t even like to think about where his chicken dinners come from, walking into that hell he saw? I’ve seen some horrible things in war zones, but the idea of what he found that night—Lissa left—left like some animal had torn into her…”

He swallowed audibly, his voice choking down to silence, the silence that so often marked the helpless rage of the survivor of a loved one’s murder. Seeing it, Shannon was haunted by the echo of her own pain, her impotent eight-year-old fury, after her father was gunned down.

If she had been a grown woman when it happened, a woman qualified to fire automatic weapons and trained to deliver a crushing blow to a man’s most vulnerable targets, would she have taken the law into her own hands as Rafe was doing now? If she had had a chance to save some part of her father, would she have been willing to sacrifice anything she had, even her own life, as Rafe would to reclaim Lissa’s daughter?

“Listen, Special Agent,” Rafe said grimly, “you haven’t lived with Garrett these past two weeks, haven’t heard the way he wakes up screaming about the blood. You haven’t watched the guy break down and sob her name, listened to him retching in the bathroom. It’s killing him, killing both of us to think of—”

“People feel remorse.” Shannon’s voice floated to earth as cautiously as the feathery pink seed of a mimosa. “People can feel regret when they’re faced with the consequences of what they’ve set in motion.”

He spun around and crossed the room in two steps before grabbing her by the arms with hands as hard as vises. “Not Garrett. I know him, know him well enough to trust him to take care of the most important person in my life. And now you have the freaking nerve to accuse him, and you think I’m going to stand here and listen to you do it?”

Heart leaping in her chest, Shannon could do no more than stiffen, frozen by the knowledge that she might have pushed too hard. Might have assumed too much about who this desperate man was, and what he would or wouldn’t do to her, despite his need for her cooperation.

He could kill her with his bare hands for the insult she had offered. Almost worse in her mind, he could try to break her will. Considering both his training and the places where his missions had taken him, he would be well acquainted with dozens of methods of coercion, from beatings that wouldn’t show to the kind of torture that would scar her soul forever.

Not him. He could never…

Yet despite her efforts to convince herself, she could feel her body recoiling, could hear the trembling of her own exhalation. Her head throbbed with the effort of containing boundless terror.

My father didn’t show fear, not even when that drug lord shoved the muzzle underneath his jaw. And my brother wouldn’t, either, so I’ll be damned if I will, no matter what he does.

The Ranger let go of her and looked away, then resumed his pacing.

To prove she wouldn’t be cowed, she forced herself to speak again, to swallow past the hard lump in her throat. “There’s more, Rafe. More we found during our investigation.”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” he asked. “I damned well don’t want to hear this.”

“If you don’t want to hear it, then you’d better gag me.” She shrugged, struggling to look as though she couldn’t care less. To look like a strong woman in a tough spot, rather than the quivering mass of nerves she felt like behind the mask. “Though you’ll have to admit, that would probably put a damper on the team-building aspect of this operation. Even more, I think, than leaving a goose egg on my forehead or these bruises on my arms.”

His gaze flicked to the reddened fingerprints on her forearms, and a troubled look passed over his face. Raking his hand through his black hair, he shook his head and said, “Fine, then. Say whatever it is you think you have to tell me. I won’t promise to listen—but you don’t have to worry that I’ll hurt you for it.”