There were a host of theories, each more horrifying than the last, regarding the crime itself, but state and federal investigators alike agreed on one fact. The two assailants had been male, with both sporting facial hair and a compact, muscular build.
It seemed likely the men were working for someone else, a monster who had set all this in motion. Could a creature cruel enough to order an unborn infant sliced from the womb of an expectant mother possibly be a woman?
The light in Rafe’s green eyes went almost feral. “My niece. I only want my niece back.”
“Of course.” She cursed her spinning head and the confusion that came with it. “Then you’ve found evidence the baby survived?”
“We were going to have a girl.” Smith’s voice broke as he interrupted. “A little girl, and we were going to name her Amber Lee.”
“But do you know the baby lived?” Gritting her teeth against the pain, Shannon focused on the question, on keeping her eyes open.
“We don’t have hard proof,” Smith admitted. “But we think… She has to—”
“She’s alive,” Rafe promised, his voice a rumble of barely suppressed emotion. “She’s alive, and I’ll kill anyone who stands between me and getting that little girl back to her family.”
Dabbing once more at the dripping blood, Shannon pushed herself into a sitting position, then stared up at him and challenged, “Does that include a federal agent, Lyons? Because I mean to stop you. I plan to bring you in. Today.”
RAFE STARED, dumbfounded, into the brunette’s ice-blue eyes. Eyes that stood out starkly from a face that he thought might be attractive despite the blood dripping from the rising purple lump below her hairline.
She was serious, he realized, recognizing the same raw determination that marked the soldiers of his unit. The men who earned the Ranger tab, who earned respect through leadership and combat.
She might have frozen on that crowded street, hesitated for the single instant it took him to predict what she would do. But he knew damned well she would have shot any man who was a fraction of a second slower—or any less desperate than he was to find his niece.
Yet it was neither the coldness of her gaze nor the memory of her training that reminded him to tread carefully around her. It was the starkness of her statement, a statement another man might have laughed off but he instead took as a warning.
She would not go quietly. Would not concede defeat even as she slumped back against the plush white leather, her blue eyes fluttering closed.
As Garrett slowed for a red light, a jacked-up black pickup pulled beside them, its bass thumping out a salsa rhythm. Ignoring it, Lyons pushed the towel she’d dropped into her hands, and in that single moment she erupted into action.
She drew back her legs, then screamed and kicked at the driver’s-side window, clearly hoping to draw attention, maybe even smash the glass. Still too weak to be effectual, she did no better than a couple of hard thumps.
In less time than it took for Garrett to let out a startled oath, Rafe hauled her around and pushed the fist-size black stun gun against the curve of her waist.
When she went still, he laid on the Texas drawl. “You don’t want another friendly zap, now do you? Come on, sugar. Calm down.”
Pressing her back against the door, she glared up at him, her look pure poison. But the effort must have cost her, for the face behind the bloody mask paled, and her eyelids fluttered even harder.
Blinking hard, she grimaced and then slurred, “I’m not your ‘sugar,’ cowboy.”
“And I’m not your ‘cowboy,’ Special Agent,” Rafe said with a shake of his head. As the car once more began moving, he said quietly, “But I’d like to be… Well, I sincerely hope to be your partner for a while.”
First confusion and then mutiny flashed across her face. Her lips moved—he thought he might have read Hell, no—but no sound followed.
And wouldn’t, as her last measure of determination winked out and those striking blue eyes rolled back into her head.
Chapter Two
Rafe had been wrong, he realized, as he washed her face with the towel Garrett had dampened in the restroom of a gas station. The woman they had taken was nothing like attractive beneath the drying blood. She was gorgeous, plain and simple. Maybe not a conventional beauty, with her mouth a little too wide, her brows a bit too dark and her nose tipped upward a bit too much at the end, but taken together with those probing light blue eyes he’d seen, the effect was…damned uncomfortable.
So he shoved the thought out of his brain, ignoring the subtle curves of her toned body and the fact that he’d been without a woman for so long he couldn’t—
Guilt burned as if he’d swallowed one of his sergeant’s lit cigars. What the hell was his problem, that he could forget Lissa—murdered, mutilated—and lose his focus on her stolen child for even an instant? As a battle-hardened Ranger, he was well trained, experienced at ignoring his body’s demands. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion—wasn’t he always telling his men these were nothing compared to a warrior’s force of will?
As beautiful, as vulnerable, as Special Agent Shannon Brandt might be, he needed to see her only as an asset to be recruited, assuming he could find some way to convince her to cooperate with his plan.
And if the concussion she had clearly sustained wasn’t serious enough to drop her into a coma, or maybe even kill her.
As they continued driving south, he pointed out an exit. “That’s the one. You need to take that one.”
“I’ve got it—got it.” Garrett darted a nervous scowl over his shoulder. “You know, Rafe, you’re even more annoying when you’re a backseat driver.”
“You don’t have to like me, buddy.” Rafe smiled without a trace of humor, thinking that his computer geek brother-in-law wouldn’t last a day in infantry. “Just keep in mind that I’m in charge here—and you’re my prisoner in all this—every bit as much as she is. You be sure and tell the cops and feds that.”
SHANNON PEERED through slitted eyes, then started at the unexpected dimness. Though she felt the movement of a vehicle, it was different, no longer the vintage Caddy with its white-leather backseat.
Sometime during the day she had been moved, strapped into the dark gray cloth rear seat of a completely different vehicle. She sat up and then hissed through clenched teeth as her headache reignited.
“Feeling any better, Special Agent?” Rafe Lyons turned in the front passenger seat to look her over. “You look better. Color’s improved.”
“Thanks, Nurse Ratched,” she said, and raised her cuffed hands to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Nice to know you care.”
“Good to see your sense of humor’s intact.” A wry grin tipped his mouth—a mouth that under different circumstances she might think of as sensual.
“You’re mistaken. I’m not laughing, cowboy. What time is it? Where are we?”
“You’ve been in and out of it all day,” he said. “You remember anything?”
Vague snippets crossed her bruised synapses. The droning hum of a highway. Wisps of quiet conversation. A stop someplace—a small house?—where an older woman’s sympathetic face floated into view as she helped Shannon change her bloody top. She saw Rafe’s face, too, hard-set with concentration as he placed a bandage on her forehead and fed her what he had claimed was a mild painkiller, then helped her to wash it down with bottled water.
Had there been a sleeping pill, too, despite the risks of mixing one with her head injury? Probably not, Shannon decided, recalling the sleepless nights she’d spent