Chapter 2
“Mama, I don’t want to go to Mrs. Cochran’s house. I don’t like her.”
Allie paused in the middle of buckling Anna into her booster seat and gazed over at Gaby as unease coursed through her. “What do you mean, you don’t like her? Since when? Last week you said you thought she was nice. She pushed you on the swing and let you have Popsicles and played Chutes and Ladders with you.”
Gaby shrugged. “She’s nice sometimes. Not all the time.”
Oh, she did not need this. Everything had been going so well. Her insulin level was more stable than it had been for a long time. Her job cleaning houses, though a far cry from her work as a triage nurse at a busy innercity emergency room back in Philadelphia, gave her a steady income and more importantly, health insurance.
And she’d detected absolutely no sign that anyone had followed her.
The only fly in her particular ointment was her next-door neighbor. She had to admit, she’d suffered more than a few bad moments after learning she’d had the bad luck to move in next to an FBI agent.
After much angst, though, she decided she could risk living here for a few more weeks, just until she could pay off the car repair bill to Ruth’s son. She would just do her best to stay out of his way and pray he would have no reason to connect the drab Lisa Connors to Alicia DeBarillas.
Avoiding the man hadn’t been tough at all since he never seemed to be around.
Other than that stress of living next to Gage McKinnon, things had been going so well. She thought she had found the perfect caregiver for the girls while she was working, someone matronly and loving. Ruth Jensen had suggested an older, widowed neighbor of hers who took in children to earn a little extra money. Dora Cochran had come with other glowing recommendations and the arrangement had been working well, or so Allie had thought.
“What does she do that’s not nice?” she asked carefully.
Gaby’s little brow furrowed as she thought it over. “Yesterday she said I talk too much and told me to shut up. And she told Anna to stop acting like a baby on account of she started to cry after Mrs. Thompson turned off Blue’s Clues so she could watch Oprah.”
The woman wasn’t exactly beating them but she didn’t sound particularly loving either. Allie gave a mental groan. What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t dump her children off at a place where they weren’t comfortable, but she had nowhere else to send them. She hated this. Absolutely hated it.
She had to work; she had no choice. Much of her and Jaime’s savings had gone toward her medical bills and legal fees in the last six months. Though she had received life insurance benefits after his accident, it had all been tied up in the custody battle.
Before she left, Allie had pulled everything liquid out of their accounts, figuring that if she was careful, she and the girls could survive for five or six months on her small nest egg, especially if she could find a job with health insurance to pay for her insulin. But she couldn’t tap into that now. If they had to move on quickly for any reason, she would need that nest egg to fall back on.
She needed her job, but Allie knew she wouldn’t be able to work a moment if she was constantly worrying about her daughters.
“Okay, honey. If you don’t want to go back to Mrs. Cochran’s, you don’t have to. I’ll figure something out.”
Her mind scrambled to come up with some solution. Today she was scheduled to clean four vacation rental properties whose occupants had already checked out. Since they were vacant, she was sure Ruth wouldn’t mind if the girls went along with her, just until she could find someone else to watch them. She would give her a call just to make sure, but she didn’t think the other woman would have a problem with it. She had been more than accommodating so far and had treated her and the girls with a kindness that often brought tears to Allie’s eyes.
“You might be able to come with me today,” she told the girls. “I’ll just need to check with Mrs. Jensen and get some videos and some toys and crayons from inside so you have something to do.”
“Yippee!” Gaby cheered.
“’Ippee!” Anna echoed.
Allie headed back up the steps, then paused and looked over the hedge separating her rental house from its cheerful twin next door. Her neighbor would probably have something to say about a mother who would leave her daughters in the car while she ran back inside her house, even when it was only for a moment.
With a heavy sigh, she jogged back down the steps, opened the car door then unhooked the girls from their boosters. “Come on. You can wait inside while I gather some things.”
She shouldn’t care what some broodingly handsome, interfering FBI agent thought. Besides, the man seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Probably undercover somewhere, she thought, sticking his nose into some other poor woman’s business.
She had seen no signs of him over there since her birthday the week before when he had come knocking at her door, accusing her of being an unfit mother.
He hadn’t really, she reminded herself. She had reacted far out of proportion to what had no doubt been well-intentioned advice. When she’d had time to cool down—and time for her terror to fade—she appreciated his warning and the reminder to be more careful with her daughters.
Later that evening over birthday cake and pizza she had reminded both girls about their family’s safety rules. Don’t ever talk to strangers; don’t ever give your name to a stranger; don’t ever take rides from strangers; report any strangers to an adult. She had to walk the same fine line every parent confronted, between scaring the girls to death and instilling a necessary sense of self-preservation in them.
They seemed to have gotten the message without destroying their natural gregariousness. The night before, Gaby had even started to strike up a conversation with a woman in the grocery line then stopped in midsentence and asked her mother if she knew the other woman or if she was a stranger, and if she was a stranger, could Allie please find out her name so Gaby could finish telling her about the baby kittens she’d seen outside the store?
She supposed she owed Gage McKinnon an apology for reacting so strongly to his advice, even though her own sense of self-preservation warned her she should stay as far away as possible from such a dangerous man.
But how could she apologize to him if he was never home? His late-model SUV hadn’t been parked in the driveway since that morning a week earlier and his windows were tightly closed, even though a warm spell had hit Utah in the last few days. Not only had the windows not been opened but the curtains hadn’t so much as twitched an inch in seven days.
She didn’t want to be curious about his whereabouts but she had to admit she found herself watching out for his tall, muscular frame wherever they went. She didn’t know if that funny flutter in her stomach at the idea of seeing him again stemmed from fear or anticipation.
She wrenched her mind from her dratted neighbor and focused on the girls. “Find a few things to take with us today while I call Ruth, all right?”
She watched them go, Gaby chattering with excitement about all the things she was going to take and Anna trailing dutifully along behind, as usual.
Love for these two sweet children crept up on her and completely took her breath away, as it sometimes did. She would have died if she lost them, literally would have shriveled up and faded away into nothing. They were her heart, her soul, her life. Everything.
She wanted to hate Jaime’s parents for what they had tried to do. At first when she had awakened in the hospital and been served with the paperwork petitioning for custody of the girls because of her condition, she had been both livid and terrified. For a long time her emotions had seesawed between fury and