Egan Cassidy's Kid

by Beverly Barton

  “Grace Felton is only two years older than Bent,” Maggie corrected. “She’s hardly an older woman. Besides, I’ve known Grace’s parents all my life and—”

  “She’s quite suitable for Bent.”

  “Lord, did I sound that snobbish?” Maggie stood perched on a tall, wooden ladder placed against the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at the back of the room.

  “I did hear a hint of Gil Douglas in that comment.” Janice eyed the books in front of her. “Should I start on these today or wait until tomorrow? Repairing all eight of them will require a great deal of patience.”

  Maggie checked her wristwatch. “Since it’s nearly four, why don’t you wait and get started on that job first thing in the morning. Bent should be here soon and I’ll need you to close up shop for me today.”

  “Have you two settled your trip-to-Florida argument?” Janice slid off the stool behind the checkout counter and stretched to her full five-foot height.

  “As far as I’m concerned it’s settled.” One by one, Maggie placed the recent shipment of books, which were collections of first-person Civil War accounts, into their appropriate slots on the shelves. “Bent is too young to go off to Florida with a bunch of other teenage boys. He’ll have time enough to indulge his adventurous streak after he turns eighteen.”

  “Bent’s a great kid, you know. I don’t think you need to worry too much about him. You’ve done a wonderful job of raising him without a father,” Janice said.

  “But Bent has a father who—”

  “Who wasn’t much of a parent, even before you two got a divorce. Let’s face it, Maggie, you’ve brought up your son with practically no help from Gil Douglas.”

  “Gil tried.” Maggie wished she could have loved Gil the way a woman should love her husband. Perhaps if she had, Gil might have been a better father to Bent. In the beginning, he had made a valiant effort, had even adopted Bent. But a man like Gil Douglas just wasn’t cut out to raise another man’s son.

  “Face the truth, Maggie. Gil couldn’t get past the fact that you were engaged to him when you had your little fling with Egan Cassidy.”

  Maggie tensed. “I’ve asked you not to mention his name.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dredge up bad memories.”

  That was the problem, Maggie thought. The memories weren’t bad. They were bittersweet, but not bad. Nothing had prepared her for an affair with a man like Egan. She had been swept away by a passion unlike anything she’d known—before or since.

  “It’s all right,” Maggie said. “Just try not to forget again.”

  The bell over the front door jingled as a customer entered. Both Janice and Maggie glanced at the entrance. Mrs. Newsom, a regular patron who collected first editions and had a passion for books of every kind, waved and smiled.

  “You two just keep on doing whatever you’re doing,” Mrs. Newsom said, her sweet grin deepening the laugh lines around her mouth. “I just came to browse. I haven’t been by in several days and I’m having withdrawal symptoms.” Her girlish laughter belied the fact that she was seventy.

  Maggie climbed down the ladder, shoved it to the end of the stacks and emerged from the dark cavern of high bookshelves into the airy lightness at the front of the store, where the shelves were low and spaced farther apart. She checked her watch again. Four o’clock exactly. Bent should arrive any minute now. Her son was always punctual. A trait he had either inherited or learned from her.

  Bent regained consciousness slowly, his mind fuzzy, his body decidedly uncomfortable. Where was he? What had happened? He attempted to move, but found himself unable to do more than twitch. Someone had bound his hands and feet. He tried to call out and suddenly realized that he’d also been gagged.

  The guy in the school parking lot and someone who’d come up from behind had drugged him and tossed him into a car.

  Bent looked all around and saw total darkness. But he felt the steady rotation of tires on blacktop and heard the hum of an engine. He was still in a car, only now he was inside the trunk.

  Obviously he’d been kidnapped. But why? Who were these guys and what did they want with him? His mother’s finances were healthy enough for her to be considered wealthy by some standards, but he knew for a fact that her net worth was less than a million. Her bookstore, which specialized in rare and out-of-print books, barely broke even, so she relied on interest and dividends from her investments for her livelihood. So why would anyone kidnap him when there were kids out there whose parents were multimillionaires? It just didn’t make sense.

  Bent had heard about young boys and girls being kidnapped and sold on the black market, so he couldn’t help wondering if his abductors planned to ship him overseas. The thought of winding up on an auction block and being sold to the highest bidder soured Bent’s stomach. Or he could end up in some seedy brothel, a plaything for dirty old men. A shiver racked his body. He’d rather die first!

  But he had no intention of dying or of being used as a sex slave. He’d find a way to get out of this mess. He wasn’t going to give up without one hell of a fight!

  “I can’t understand where Bent is,” Maggie said, checking her watch again. “It’s ten after five. He always calls if he’s running late and he hasn’t called.”

  Janice grasped Maggie’s trembling hands into her steady ones and squeezed tightly. “He’s all right. Maybe he forgot. Or he could be goofing off with the guys or—”

  Maggie jerked her hands free. “Something’s wrong. He’s been in an accident or… Oh, God, where is he?”

  “Do you want me to check the hospital? I can call the ER.”

  “If he’d been in an accident, the police would have contacted me by now, wouldn’t they?”

  “I think so. Yes, of course they would have.”

  Maggie paced the floor, her soft leather shoes quiet against the wood’s shiny patina. “I’m going to call some of his friends, first, before I panic. He usually catches a ride with Chris or Mark or sometimes Jarred.”

  “So call their houses and find out if maybe he’s with one of them. And if he just forgot about calling you, don’t give him a hard time.”

  “Oh, I won’t give him a hard time,” Maggie said. “I’ll just wring his neck for worrying me to death.”

  Setting her rear end on the edge of her desk in the office alcove, separated from the bookstore by a pair of brocade curtains, Maggie lifted the telephone and dialed Chris McWilliams’s number first.

  Fifteen minutes and six calls later, Maggie knew what she had to do. Janice stood at her side, a true friend, desperate to help in any way she could. With moisture glazing her eyes, Maggie exchanged a resigned look with Janice, then lifted the receiver and dialed one final number.

  Paul Spencer, Parsons City’s chief of police answered. “Spencer here.”

  “Yes, this is Maggie Douglas. I’d like to report a missing child.”

  “Whose child is missing?” he asked.

  “Mine.”

  “Bent’s missing?” Paul, who’d gone to high school with Maggie, asked, a note of genuine concern in his voice.

  “I’ve contacted all his friends and even talked to Mr. Wellborn, the school principal. Although I dropped him at school this morning—early—for a student council meeting, he never arrived. No one has seen him all day. Oh, God, Paul…help me.”

  “Are you at home or at the shop?”

  “I’m still downtown at the shop.”

  “Stay where you are. I’ll be right over. As soon as you fill out the N.C.I.C form, we’ll get it entered into the computer. But I’ll go ahead and have a couple of men start checking around to see what they can find.”

  “Thank you.” The receiver dangled from Maggie’s fingers. Every nerve in her body screamed. This couldn’t be happening. Not to her child. Not to Bent, the boy she loved more than life itself.

  Janice took the telephone from Maggie and returned the receiver to its cradle, then she wrapped her arms around her best friend. Maggie hugged Janice fie
rcely as she tried to control her frazzled emotions. This was a parent’s worst nightmare. A missing child. She kept picturing Bent hurt and alone, crying for help. Then that scenario passed from her mind and another quickly took its place. Bent kidnapped and abused—perhaps even killed.

  Maggie clenched her teeth tightly in an effort not to scream aloud.

  Egan Cassidy poured himself a glass of Grand cru Chablis as he watched the salmon steak sizzling on the indoor grill. As a general rule, he dined alone, as he did tonight. Occasionally he had beer and a sandwich at a local bar with another Dundee agent. And once in a blue moon he actually took a woman out to dinner. But as he grew older, he found his penchant for solitude strengthening.

  He liked most of his fellow Dundee agents, but except for two or three, they were younger than he. Perhaps the age difference was the reason he had very little in common with most of the other employees of the premiere private security and investigation firm in the Southeast, some said in the entire United States.

  And as for the ladies—he’d never been a womanizer, not even in his youth. There had been special women, of course, and a few minor flirtations. But it had been years since he’d dated anyone on a regular basis. He had found that most of the women close to his age, those within a ten-year-span older or younger, were often bitter from a divorce or desperate because they’d never married. And he found younger women, especially those in their twenties, a breed unto themselves. Whenever he dated a woman under thirty, he somehow felt as if he were dating his daughter’s best friend. Of course, he didn’t have a daughter, but the fact was that at the ripe old age of forty-seven he easily could have a twenty-five-year-old daughter.

  Egan turned the salmon steak out onto a plate, then carried the plate and the wine to the table in his kitchen. Although the kitchen in his Atlanta home was ultramodern, his table and chairs were antiques that he’d brought here from his apartment in Memphis. Over the years, while he’d traveled the world as a soldier of fortune, he had always returned to the States, so he’d maintained a place in his old hometown. But two years ago, after joining the Dundee Agency, he’d bought a home in Atlanta and moved his furniture, many priceless antiques, into his newly purchased two-story town house.

  The salmon flaked to the touch of his fork and melted like butter when he put it into his mouth. He ate slowly, savoring every bite. He enjoyed cooking and had found that he was a rather good chef.

  Egan poured himself more Chablis, then stood, picked up the bowl of fresh raspberries on the counter and headed for the living room. He could clean up later, before bedtime, he thought. As he entered the twenty-by-twenty room, he punched a button on the CD player and the strains of the incomparable Stan Getz’s saxophone rendition of “Body and Soul” filled the room. The stereo system he and his friend and fellow Dundee agent, Hunter Whitelaw, had installed was state-of-the-art. The best money could buy. Everything Egan owned was the best.

  Easing down into the soft, lush leather chair, he sighed and closed his eyes, savoring the good music as he had savored the good food. Maybe growing up on the mean streets of Memphis, with no one except an alcoholic father for family, had whetted Egan’s appetite for the good things in life. And maybe his lack of a decent upbringing and his brief tenure in Vietnam when he’d been barely eighteen had predisposed him for the occupation to which he had devoted himself for twenty-five years. He’d made a lot of money as a mercenary and had invested wisely, turning his ill-gained earnings into quite a tidy sum. He had more than enough money, so if he chose to never work again, he could maintain his current lifestyle as long as he lived.

  Two hours later, the kitchen cleaned and the bottle of Chablis half-empty, Egan made his way into his small home office. The bookshelves and furniture were a light oak and the walls a soft cream. The only color in the room was the dark green, tufted-back leather chair behind his desk. This was the one room in the town house that his decorator hadn’t touched. He smiled when he remembered Heather Sims. She’d been interested—very interested. And if he had chosen to pursue a relationship with her, she would have been only too happy to have filled his lonely hours with idle chitchat and hot sex. Three dates, one night of vigorous lovemaking and they had parted as friends.

  Egan sat, then opened his notebook and picked up a pen. No one knew that he wrote poetry. Not that he was ashamed, just that to him it was such a private endeavor. At first, it had been a catharsis, and perhaps even now it still was.

  With pen in hand, he wrote.

  because he was eighteen

  he was considered

  man enough to fight old men’s wars…

  The ringing telephone jarred him from his memories, from a time long ago when he’d lived a nightmare—a boy trapped in the politicians’ war, a boy who became a man the hard way.

  Egan lifted the receiver. “Cassidy here.”

  “Well, well, well. Hello, old friend.”

  Egan’s blood ran cold. He hadn’t heard that voice in years. The last time he’d run into Grant Cullen, they’d both been in the Middle East, both doing nasty little jobs for nasty little men. When had that been, six years ago? No, more like eight.

  “What do you want, Cullen?”

  “Now, is that any way to talk to an old friend?”

  “We were never friends.”

  Cullen laughed and the sound of his laughter chilled Egan to the bone. Something was wrong. Bad wrong. His gut instincts warned him that this phone call meant big trouble.

  “You’re right,” Grant Cullen agreed. “Neither of us has ever had many friends, have we?”

  Cullen was playing some sort of game, Egan thought, and he was enjoying himself too damn much. “You want something. What is it?”

  “Oh, just to talk over old times. You know, reminisce about the good old days. Discuss how you screwed me over in Nam and how I’ve been waiting nearly thirty years to return the favor.”

  “You want me, you know where to find me,” Egan said, his voice deadly soft.

  “Oh, I want you all right, but I want you to come to me.”

  “Now why the hell would I do that?”

  “Because I’ve got something that belongs to you. Something you’ll want back.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Egan clutched the phone tightly, his knuckles whitening from the strength of his grasp.

  “Remember Bentley Tyson III, that good ol’ boy from Alabama who saved your life back in Nam?”

  “How the hell do you know about Bentley?”

  “You’ve been paying for flowers to be put on his grave every year ever since he killed himself fifteen years ago.”

  “Get to the point,” Egan snapped, highly agitated that a man like Cullen would even dare to say Bentley’s name. Bentley, who’d been a good man destroyed by an evil war.

  “The point is I know that when you paid your condolences to Tyson’s little sister fifteen years ago, you stayed in Parsons City for a week. What were you doing, Cassidy, screwing Maggie Tyson?”

  Egan saw red. Figuratively and literally. Rage boiled inside him like lava on the verge of erupting from a volcano. How did Cullen know about Maggie, about the fact that he’d spent a week in her home?

  He’s guessing about the affair you had with her, Egan assured himself. He wants to think Maggie meant something to you, that she still does.

  “I don’t know where you got your information,” Egan said. “But you’ve got it all wrong. Bentley’s little sister was engaged to a guy named Gil Douglas and they got married a few months after Bentley’s funeral.”

  “Oh, I know sweet Maggie was engaged, but she didn’t marry Gil Douglas until five years later. What Maggie did a few months after Bentley’s funeral—nine months to be exact—was give birth to a bouncing baby boy.”

  Egan felt as if he’d been hit in the belly with a sledgehammer. His heartbeat drummed in his ears. He broke out in a cold sweat. No, God, please, no! He’d spent his entire adult life looking over his shoulder, waiting for Gr
ant Cullen to attack. He had denied himself the love and companionship of a wife and the pride and joy of children to protect them from the revenge Cullen would be sure to wreak on anyone who meant a damn thing to Egan.

  “What’s the matter, buddy boy, didn’t sweet Maggie tell you that you have a son?”

  “You’re crazy! I don’t have a son.” He couldn’t have a child. God wouldn’t be that cruel.

  “Oh, yes, you do. A fine boy of fourteen. Big, tall, handsome. Looks a whole hell of a lot like you did when you were eighteen and you and I were buddies in that POW camp.”

  “I do not have a son,” Egan repeated.

  “Yes, Cassidy, you do. You and Maggie Tyson Douglas.”

  Cullen laughed again, a sharp, maniacal sound that sliced flesh from Egan’s bones.

  “You’re wrong,” Egan said, his statement a plea to God as well as a denial to Cullen.

  “Run a check. Your name is on his birth certificate. And one look at a photograph of Bentley Tyson Douglas will confirm the facts.”

  “I don’t believe anything you’ve told me. You’re a lying son of a bitch!”

  “Well, believe this, buddy boy. As we speak, your son is in my hands. I had him flown in from Alabama this afternoon. So just think about that for a while. And you have a good night. Bye now.”

  Chapter 2

  It couldn’t be true. Maggie’s child couldn’t be his. She would never have kept the boy a secret from him all these years. Not Maggie. She would have come to him, told him, expected him to do the right thing.

  Don’t be an idiot, Cassidy, an inner voice chided. You ended things with her rather abruptly once you realized she was in love with you. You gave her a hundred and one reasons why a committed relationship between the two of you would never work. You broke her heart. Why would she have come to you if, later on, she’d discovered she was carrying your child? You had made it perfectly clear that you didn’t love her or want her.

  And there was another reason he couldn’t be the father of Maggie’s child—he had used condoms when he’d made love to her. He never had unprotected sex. The last thing he’d ever wanted was to father a child—someone Cullen could use against him.