For his part, though he took care not to show it, Tate felt terrible. He could certainly imagine what was going through Hannah’s mind. What Caleb’s sister was anticipating. He would have given anything to comfort her, but that wasn’t what was going to save her.
In order to accomplish that, he had to be convincing in his role. Which meant that he needed to go on with this charade, continue to maintain this facade so that he could, ultimately, get her and her friends away from these men.
If he went about it the traditional way, pulling out a service weapon and threatening to shoot the other man if he got in his way, Tate knew that he might—or might not—be able to get out of the hotel with Hannah. Most likely, they’d be stopped before they ever made it to the street level.
No, this way was more effective. It just required a great deal of focus and an iron will—and the ability to block out that look in her eyes to keep it from getting to him.
“What did I tell you about opening your mouth?” the guard was demanding angrily. He pulled back his hand, ready to bring it down on her face.
Hannah’s alarmed cry tore at his heart.
“If she has one mark on her, the deal’s off,” Tate warned him in a voice that was deadly calm, belying the turmoil that lay just beneath.
The guard stopped in midswing. The expression on his face told Tate that the guard was getting fed up with what he undoubtedly considered a high-and-mighty client. The man let his guard down for a second, the sneer on his face telling Tate that he thought he knew his type. Not just knew it, but hated it because he felt inferior to the supposedly rich client.
“You don’t buy her, someone else will,” the guard jeered contemptuously. But he dropped his hand to his side nonetheless. “Sit!” he ordered Hannah with less compassion than he would have directed to a pet dog. Only when she complied did the guard finally look his way. “So, I take it we’ve got a deal. You’re interested in acquiring this tasty morsel?”
Tate’s expression gave nothing away, including the fact that he could easily vivisect him without so much as a thought. “I might be,” he replied after a beat had gone by.
“Might be,” the man echoed with contempt. He was at the end of his patience. “Look, the man I represent doesn’t like having his time wasted. We’re alike that way because neither do I.”
Tate slowly walked around the young woman, deliberately pausing and taking a lock of her hair between his fingers. He made a show of sniffing it. “That goes both ways.”
Suspicion immediately entered the guard’s eyes. “So what do you have in mind?”
There was no hesitation on Tate’s part. “A man doesn’t buy an expensive car without taking it on a test run, seeing how it handles,” he pointed out, his voice continuing to be flat.
It killed him to see that Hannah had winced again in response to his words, and he saw real fear in her eyes as she watched him.
How did he get it across to her that he was one of the good guys without blowing his cover?
“Go on, I’m listening,” the other man said.
“I’d like a private session with her, to see how we ‘get along,’” Tate proposed.
“The boss doesn’t deal in damaged goods,” the other man snapped.
“I have no intentions of ‘damaging’ her. Just ‘sampling’ her,” Tate informed him. “There are a lot of ways a man can see if he likes the goods he’s getting.”
He was standing in front of Hannah now, looking into her eyes, wishing there was some way to set her mind at ease. His back was to the other man and he smiled at Hannah. The smile was kind, devoid of the lust that had supposedly brought him here. Lowering his head so that his lips were right next to the young woman’s ear, he whispered, “Caleb sent me,” before straightening and backing off.
Her eyes widened, but she held her tongue.
Tate said a quick, silent prayer of thanksgiving to whoever it was that watched over law enforcement officers.
“What did you say to her?” the guard demanded. There was no arguing with his tone.
Tate turned to look at him, emulating the latter’s previous smug look. “I told her that paradise was at hand.”
As he said that, Tate slanted a look toward Hannah, hoping she would put two and two together and take some comfort in the covert message. He couldn’t tell by her expression if she’d believed him—or even understood what he was trying to tell her. He wasn’t even sure if she’d heard him say that Caleb had sent him.
Terror, he knew, had a way of blocking out everything else.
The man relaxed a little, then laughed. “Good one,” he pronounced. “That’s where she and some of those other girls come from, some backward hole-in-the-wall called Paradise Ridge.”
Tate tried to sound casually uninterested. A man making small talk, involved in a meaningless conversation that would be forgotten before he walked out the door. “Is that where all the girls are from? This Paradise Ridge place you just mentioned?”
His question was met with a nod. “This batch is. They picked up others from—” He abruptly stopped his narrative. His eyebrows narrowed over small, deep-set eyes. “What’s with all the questions?”
Tate shrugged. “Just trying to find out how big a selection you’ve got—in case things don’t work out with this one,” he explained.
“Oh, it’ll work out,” the man promised. There was no room for argument. He looked at Hannah pointedly. “She knows what’ll happen to her if it doesn’t. Don’t you, honey?” The smile on his lips was cold enough to freeze a bucket of water in the middle of May.
This time, instead of fear rising in Hannah’s eyes, Tate thought he saw anger. Anger and frustration because, he guessed, there was nothing she could do right now about the anger she was feeling.
The other man was apparently oblivious to her reaction. It was clear that fear was all he looked for, all he valued.
“Don’t want to wind up like your girlfriends now, do you?” he taunted her.
Things suddenly fell into place. The annoying little troll was referring to the two dead girls Emma and Hannah’s brother had initially discovered. Solomon Miller, a so-called “repentant” Amish outcast had brought them straight to the bodies, hoping to use the fact that he was informing on his “boss” as a bargaining chip.
Initially part of the group of men involved in the sex trafficking ring, Miller had become the task force’s inside man, trading information for the promise of immunity once all the pieces of this case came together and they got enough on the men running this thing to take them to court—and put them away for the next century or so.
If they didn’t wait until they discovered exactly who was behind all this and bring him—or her—in, if they just grabbed up the two-bit players they were dealing with in this little drama, the operation would just fold up and relocate someplace else.
And Amish girls would continue disappearing as long as there were sick men to make their abductions a profitable business.
No, they had to catch the mastermind in order for this operation to be deemed a success.
“Don’t threaten her,” Tate warned. When the guard shot him a malevolent look, he told him, “I want her to be willing to be with me, not because she was threatened with harm if she wasn’t.”
The guard looked at him as if he wasn’t dealing with a full deck. “Hey, man, don’t you know? It’s better when they fight you.”
The world would be a much better place if he could just squash this cockroach, Tate thought, struggling to hang on to his temper. With no qualms whatsoever, Tate would