“Yes. Of course,” she answered, cautiously.
“Good. Because that’s not one of my vehicles back there, but it could belong to someone connected to the hostage situation.”
Her fear went up another notch, even though she’d already been through this mentally a hundred times. “But why follow me? If they want to eliminate a potential witness, why not just try to kill me?”
“Maybe because they haven’t had the right opportunity. Maybe they wanted to wait to kill you when they figured there would be no one around to see. Like now, for instance, when you’re on a deserted country road.”
Oh, God. He could be right.
“Start driving,” Houston instructed. “But keep your speed down.”
She glanced at the car, nodded and got her own vehicle moving. Thankfully, the black vehicle stayed put.
“If the gunmen did have an accomplice, would he have known that you had a child?” Houston asked her.
Gabrielle didn’t have to think long about that. “Probably. Lucas was born in the hospital not long after the gunmen stormed the place. After I delivered him, the gunmen made the nurse take him and put him in the nursery because they wanted all the babies in one place.”
She shuddered and bit her bottom lip to keep those nightmarish memories at bay.
Houston cursed and shook his head. “Could this accomplice know that he’s my son?”
She started to say no, but the truth was, Gabrielle had no idea, because she didn’t know who these people following her were. She’d been a lawyer long enough to know that leaks happened. Information could be misdirected. And people could be bribed.
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Houston agreed. “There could be a good reason why the accomplice hasn’t already killed you. They might want you to lead them to Lucas. That way, they have you, Lucas and about a billion dollars they can demand for my son’s ransom.”
Gabrielle’s gaze flew to the rearview mirror.
The black car was coming right at them.
Chapter Three
Houston wanted to curse. How the hell had he let this situation come to this?
He should have tackled Gabrielle when she ran from the barn, or else forced her to stay put while he made arrangements to go and get the baby. He damn sure shouldn’t be sitting on a backcountry road with would-be kidnappers who might be ready to pounce.
A billion dollars was lot of motive to get a potential kidnapper to force Gabrielle into revealing Lucas’s location. God knows what they would do to her to get the information they wanted.
Houston laid his phone on the dash so his hands would be free. “Do you have ammunition for this?” he asked, taking the Saturday-night special from the back waist of his jeans.
She gave a shaky nod but didn’t take her eyes off the black car behind them. “In the glove compartment.”
Houston jerked it open and started to load the gun.
“What should I do?” she wanted to know.
“Keep driving.” Not that he thought that would solve their problem. The car would probably continue to follow them. But anything was better than just sitting there waiting for the worst to happen.
Houston finished loading the gun then he grabbed his phone.
“No!” she insisted. “You can’t call the sheriff. What if he’s in on this? If the DNA information was indeed leaked to the men following us, he might have been the one to do it.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Well, as a minimum, he told your father about Lucas, something you asked him to keep to himself.”
“True. But you don’t know my father. He can be a very persuasive man. He probably convinced the sheriff I was on the verge of suicide or something.”
Sheriff Whitley was decent and honest. But Houston didn’t know his deputies nearly as well. Or any of the people who worked in the sheriff’s office. One of them could be in on this, and Gabrielle was right—a call to the sheriff might be giving yet more information to the wrong people.
“I’ll hold off calling him for now,” Houston let her know. He angled the visor so he could use the attached vanity mirror to keep watch on the car behind them. As expected, it was still there. “But I need to talk to Dale, my foreman.”
“You can trust him?”
“If I couldn’t, he wouldn’t be working for me,” Houston said, assuring her. He scrolled through the names, hit the call button, and Dale answered on the first ring. “You okay?” his foreman immediately asked. “For now. But I got a problem and I need your help. This stays between us, got that? Not a word of it to my father.”
“I understand. What do you need me to do?”
“First, I want you to get two ranch hands, ones you trust. Ones who are good with a gun and can keep a calm head. Have them take one of the trucks and drive out to Farm Road six six one, so they can follow me. I’m in Gabrielle Markham’s blue Ford. She’s the one who just drove away from the ranch. We’ve got someone who’s tailing us, and I’d like a chance to talk to that someone.”
Dale’s breathing was suddenly audible. So was Gabrielle’s, and she gripped on to the steering wheel so hard that she’d likely have bruises. She was scared and had good reason to be.
Hell, he was scared, too.
Not for himself. Not even for her. But for the son he’d just learned he had.
Later, he would have to come to terms with that. Later, he’d celebrate and file away all the emotions and old pain that was now right at the surface. Lizzy and he finally had the baby they’d always wanted, and that baby was at risk.
“Houston, are you okay?” Dale repeated.
“I will be when you get those ranch hands out here. Don’t call Sheriff Whitley yet. Instead, phone my old friend, Jordan Taylor, the security specialist in San Antonio, and have him run the license plate, VSM seven six eight,” he read from the black car that was following them. “And I need you to do one final thing.”
“Just say the word.”
In some ways, this would be the most unsavory request of all. But it was a necessary one. “Check through the records of the ranch’s vehicles and see who last used the green Range Rover and when.”
“Will do,” Dale assured him. “I’ll call you when I have news, and I’ll get help out to you right away.”
Houston hung up and put the phone on the seat next to him so he could reach it in a hurry.
“Which way should I go?” Gabrielle asked, drawing Houston’s attention back to her. The sign ahead pointed to the turn for the highway.
“Stay on this road,” Houston instructed.
It was deserted, which meant there would be no one around to help if those guys started shooting, but he knew this road like the back of his hand, and Gabrielle and he might need to take one of the old ranch trails if necessary. That would be a last option, but Houston wanted to keep that possibility available.
“If that’s the gunmen’s accomplice back there and he’s really after Lucas, then he won’t kill us,” he tried to assure Gabrielle.
Not intentionally, anyway. But such an accomplice would likely want to keep Gabrielle alive only so they could get Lucas’s