JOSH

by Delores Fossen

  The tone was the same old Jaycee. Smart mouth. In charge. But Josh could see that her hands were trembling.

  “It looked like more than scratching your nose to me,” the man on the intercom fired back. “You girls aren’t trying to plan something, are you? Like another escape attempt? Because the last one didn’t go so good, did it?”

  So they were being held against their will. But why? And who was doing this?

  “We learned our lesson about that already,” Jaycee said, and the two others bobbed their heads in agreement.

  The women were at the wrong angle to see Josh, and Jaycee made it even harder for them to spot him by stepping to the side. Positioning herself and that bat-wing windbreaker between the camera and him.

  “So do I have permission to scratch my nose?” Jaycee yelled.

  “Yeah. For now anyway. But if you try to break any more cameras, this time your roommates are gonna pay for it.”

  The moments crawled by, and there was a slight crackling sound. Jaycee’s shoulders slumped, and she blew out a barely audible breath.

  “I’m getting some air,” she said to no one in particular, and she turned and headed toward the back door.

  And Josh.

  He saw it then. When she turned to the side and the windbreaker shifted. Her belly. Not flat as it’d been the last time they’d crossed paths.

  Jaycee was pregnant.

  Oh, man.

  Josh forced himself to stay quiet and calm. And he also forced himself to think about the timing of all of this. It wasn’t hard to remember the only time Jaycee and he had slept together. Because that was the same day he’d nearly died.

  Five months ago.

  Like the flashbacks, that hit him darn hard, like a heavyweight’s fist to the gut. But he bit back any sound of surprise because if the guards heard him, it would likely get them killed.

  Jaycee didn’t look at him. In fact, she gave no indication whatsoever that she knew he was even there. She strolled to the back door, eased it open several inches farther than it already was and took a deep breath—like someone indeed getting a little fresh air.

  “Don’t move,” she mouthed, her chin still lifted slightly in her fresh-air pose. “I broke the lens a couple of days ago with a rock, and they haven’t gotten a replacement yet.” She tipped her head to the tiny camera mounted on the eaves. “Right now, you’re out of camera range for the one inside, and you need to stay that way.”

  He nodded, didn’t move, except to drop his gaze to her stomach. “Whose baby is that?” he asked in a whisper.

  She opened her mouth but then closed it just as quickly. Her attention sliced to the front door of the barn, and she whirled around to step in front of him.

  Not a second too soon.

  The door flew open, and Josh got just a glimpse of the armed goon as he rushed in.

  And he pointed his rifle right at Jaycee.

  Chapter Two

  Jaycee cursed the panic that shot through her.

  After months of being held captive, she should be used to having a gun pointed at her, but maybe that was something that never got old. Especially since each time one of the guards pointed a gun at her, they aimed at her stomach.

  The one place that they knew would get her to cooperate.

  She’d risk her own neck, but not the baby.

  However, there was a new reason to do whatever they wanted so she could get the guard out of there. Josh’s life depended on it, and sadly, so did hers and the other two women’s, Marita and Blanca.

  Her cell mates spoke only Spanish, but they understood enough English to know what they had to do. When the guard came in, they got to their feet, cowering. Both pregnant, like Jaycee, and both willing to do anything to protect the babies they carried.

  “You sure you ladies aren’t up to something?” the man growled.

  Jaycee didn’t know his name, but he was bald, ugly and big, which described every guard who’d been at the ranch over the past month.

  This one came in at least several times a day, and he always made a repeat visit after bringing one of them back from the house. Maybe because he thought they were going to discuss whatever they’d seen or heard in there. Or maybe he thought they’d break some more cameras.

  On each of these visits, Jaycee wished she could punch the guy in the face, take that rifle and get herself and the others out. But so far, escape had been impossible.

  Maybe it still was.

  She couldn’t risk verbally warning Josh to stay put, but hopefully he would. He was a good agent. At least he had been before the shooting that’d nearly left him dead. If they survived the next few minutes, maybe she would be able to ask him how he’d found her and how he planned to get them all out.

  And he’d better have a plan.

  A darn good one.

  Keeping herself directly in front of the door, Jaycee lifted the leg of her scrub pants to remind the jerk that since her attempted escape, she had been wearing an ankle monitor. One that would alert him if she did manage to get out of the barn. So far, she’d had no luck in getting the monitor off or disabling the Big Brother camera inside that watched them 24/7.

  The jerk stared at them awhile longer. Jaycee didn’t prolong his stay by glaring at him as she sometimes did. Her glare would rile him, she knew that for a fact, but a riled man just stayed longer.

  She wanted him out of there now.

  Finally, he mumbled something and got moving. So did Jaycee. She knew the angles of the camera and the blind spots. Well, one blind spot anyway. Even the bathroom that’d been added in the corner had no door. But she had learned that any time she moved into the remains of the horse stall just to the left of the back barn door that one of the jerks came running to make sure she was still there.

  Definitely a blind spot.

  “Stay low,” she whispered to Josh, “and go in there.”

  Jaycee tipped her head to the stall. She had to get him out of the yard because the guard would soon be making a sweep of that area. Maybe he wouldn’t come upon the backup that Josh had hopefully brought with him. If Josh had come alone, well, they were in trouble.

  Without making a sound, Josh slipped through the bottom part of the door and into the stall.

  “Keep your voice at a whisper,” she warned him, angling her head away from the camera. She couldn’t do that for long, either, or it would prompt another look-see from the guard. “There’s a listening device on the post by the camera, but I’ve crammed bits of hay in it to muffle the sound.”

  She was sure he heard what she said, but his smoky blue eyes were planted firmly on her stomach.

  Oh, that.

  She owed him an answer to his question.

  Since she’d first eyed that little plus sign on the home pregnancy test over four months ago, she’d wondered how she would spill this news. Josh wasn’t exactly a family man. Thirty-four and had never even lived with a woman or been engaged. Jaycee didn’t consider herself a relationship expert, but she figured that meant he hadn’t planned on becoming a father this year.

  And she didn’t care.

  This was her baby. She’d spent the last three and a half months protecting it, and she didn’t intend to stop now. The only thing she needed from Josh was his help in getting them all the heck out of there.

  Jaycee moved back to the door, propped her shoulder against the frame and pretended to examine the split ends on her hair. She spent a lot of time pretending to do mundane things that concealed her eyes and mouth just so the guards wouldn’t be alerted that she was looking for a way out of this Hades of a prison.

  “Well?” Josh prompted.

  Since an answer to that question would only waste time and distract him, Jaycee went in a different direction. One that would fully occupy his lawma
n’s attention.

  She hoped.

  “There are four guards total,” she explained. “At least two are on watch at all times. And right now, there’s a doctor inside. He’s already given me and the two women here checkups, but he’ll examine the other four women who are also being held captive in the house.”

  She risked a glance at Josh, and judging from the way he looked at her—as if she’d lost her bloomin’ mind—he hadn’t known those details.

  “You did know about the captives, right?” she asked. “And that this is a baby farm, and they’re holding us against our will?”

  He shook his head.

  That sucked the breath right out of her.

  He didn’t know. So why the devil was he here?

  Josh shucked off his black Stetson and generally looked as if he wanted to throw up in it. That only lasted a split second, and he became the tough FBI agent again.

  Or rather the hot cowboy cop.

  That wasn’t an FBI shield on his rawhide belt. It was some kind of local badge. And he was wearing jeans and a denim shirt that looked as if he’d been born to wear them. Ditto for the rumpled chocolate-brown hair. Definitely not FBI regulation length. Later, if she got the chance, she’d tell him that it suited him.

  Later, she’d tell him a lot of things.

  And maybe he would listen.

  Josh eased his phone from his pocket and fired off a text. “Will these men kill you if you try to escape?” he mouthed.

  “Oh, yeah.” She didn’t have to think about that.

  Jaycee had had enough experience with killers to know one when she saw one, and the guards were killers. She figured their boss was, too, though she’d yet to lay eyes on him. What she wanted to do was put a gun to his head and pull the trigger a couple of times. Harsh, yes, but he’d put a lot of women and babies through way too much misery.

  “They’ve had me for three and a half months.” She glanced at the other two women, who were pretending to do anything but look at her. “My Spanish sucks, but from what I’ve gathered, they were here about a month before I arrived.”

  “How’d this happen? How did they take you? Why did they take you?”

  All good questions. Too bad her answers were somewhat lacking.

  She moved to another section of her hair for the fake split-ends check. “I was coming out of a clinic after an OB visit. Another woman was walking out with me. Someone I didn’t know. But she was close to her delivery date, and we were talking. Two men grabbed her. When I tried to help her, they hit us with Tasers.”

  Those memories were almost too painful to recall, but Jaycee had tried to brand every detail into her brain so she could catch the monsters once she was able to get free.

  And she would catch them.

  “I don’t know what happened to the other woman,” Jaycee continued. Again, a painful memory that clawed at her. She hadn’t been able to save her, and now heaven knew what had happened to her and her baby.

  “Why did they take you?” he repeated, his attention on her belly again.

  “From what I’ve been able to find out, they kidnap women or force them into surrogacy and then sell the babies on the black market.”

  She let go of the hunk of her hair and moved on to nail-biting to cover the movement of her mouth. Except she was shaking enough that nail-biting didn’t exactly seem like a pretense.

  “They don’t appear to know I’m an agent,” Jaycee added.

  And that was probably the only reason she was still alive.

  This operation might not be huge, more like a sicko cottage industry, but it carried with it all sorts of felony charges. If the brains behind this thought she was FBI, they might not let her draw another breath.

  And that would mean her baby wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Or maybe they knew she was an agent and were planning to use that in some way. Maybe to get information from her.

  Josh’s phone vibrated, and he glanced at the screen before answering it. “We’re going to need a lot of backup,” he whispered to the caller. “This is a black-market baby ring. At least four armed guards in the house. Four captives, too, and another three captives here in the barn.”

  Jaycee couldn’t hear a word of what the caller said, and Josh’s body-language clues shut down, too. No more emotion in his eyes.

  Sometimes, like now, she got just a flash of the heat that’d once been between them.

  Okay, more than a flash.

  She got a full shot of the attraction that’d landed them in bed. Of course, with Josh’s alarmingly handsome looks and long and lanky body, the attraction was a given. Even after all the bad that’d gone on between them.

  He dropped his phone back in his shirt pocket and got into a crouching position. His gun ready. She hoped he had some kind of backup weapon that he could let her use.

  “When I tell you and the women to get down, do it.” Even though Josh whispered that order, it had some snarl to it. As if he’d considered that she might refuse. At this point, she wasn’t refusing anything that would get her and all the captives out.

  Jaycee managed a nod under the guise of more nail-biting, and since she didn’t know what Josh’s plan was, she stayed put. Waiting.

  Praying, too.

  “Is that baby mine?” he whispered.

  She’d been expecting the question, of course, but Jaycee wasn’t prepared for the suddenly clammy hands and her knees locking.

  “Yes,” she said.

  She purposely didn’t look at Josh because if he had another wave of nausea or some other unmanly response, he wouldn’t want her to witness it. And besides, she didn’t need the distraction of his response, either. Apparently, something was about to happen, something that would require her to shout to Marita and Blanca to get down before she did the same.

  Something that would likely be dangerous.

  Later, Josh and she could talk about the baby. Yelling would no doubt be part of that discussion, but for now, everything inside her screamed for her to do something—anything—to help with this escape.

  And soon.

  Jaycee felt useless standing there and waiting. Fortunately, she’d had a lot of practice with that during the past months, and she’d learned some other things that Josh needed to know.

  “As far as I can tell,” she whispered, “there are no working exterior cameras, and the computer inside the house seems to be rigged just to monitor the camera here in the barn and our ankle bracelets.”

  “How long will the doctor be here?” he asked. It was a logical question, no hint of the baby bombshell she’d just dropped on him.

  “Maybe awhile. I think one of the women inside is in labor.”

  That brought on some muttered profanity from Josh. With good reason. It would be hard to escape with a woman delivering a baby. As it was, it’d be difficult for some of the women to run for cover. At least Marita, Blanca and she weren’t megapregnant, and they all appeared to be in decent shape.

  It seemed as if time practically came to a stop. Jaycee couldn’t say the same for her breathing. It was gusting now, and there were beads of sweat on her face. The camera wouldn’t pick up the sweat, but the breathing would no doubt alert one of the bald goons.

  As would her continued stay near the door.

  Soon, very soon, one of them would show up to make sure she wasn’t up to no good and to order her back to her cot.

  Hoping to buy them some time from the guard check, Jaycee partially closed the back door, leaving just a one-inch gap—the way it usually stayed during the day. At night, the guards locked them in with deadbolts. She went back in the direction of the cot but didn’t sit.

  Best to stay on her feet, ready to react.

  Marita and Blanca obviously picked up on her nonverbal cues. Maybe the ve
rbal ones, too, if they’d heard Josh and her whispering. Blanca studied her from over the top of her paperback, and Marita kept volleying glances between Jaycee and the movie that she obviously wasn’t watching.

  Finally, Jaycee saw the movement in the gap in the back door. Not one of the guards. This was another cowboy with a badge. She got just a glimpse of him, but he had the same hair coloring and body build as Josh. A strong enough resemblance that this could be his brother.

  The man peeked in, his gaze briefly connecting with Josh’s, and Josh motioned for her to move to the door. She did, though Jaycee tried not to give anything away that the guards would detect.

  “It’s hot in here, huh?” she said to the others as a ploy to cover up why she was headed back in that direction.

  She cracked opened the door again and saw that it was just the one lawman, one, and while he looked capable and in charge, that meant they were still outnumbered and outgunned.

  As Josh had done, this guy dropped his gaze to her belly before he glanced in at the other women. Jaycee wasn’t sure exactly what they wanted her to do, but she figured they had a minute at most before the guard would check to see why she’d reopened the door.

  But she was wrong.

  Not even a minute.

  Just a couple of seconds.

  The front door flew open, and the guard bolted inside. Not the one who’d come in earlier. This guy had a serious mean streak and had even slapped Blanca when she hadn’t in his opinion moved fast enough.

  “Hands in the air!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, and he shifted the gun not toward her but to the stall where Josh was hiding.

  Jaycee braced herself for the guard to move closer so he could do a thorough search.

  But that didn’t happen.

  The man pulled the trigger, and the shot blasted through the barn.

  Chapter Three

  The shot was deafening, and it roared through Josh’s entire body. The flashbacks started again, but he shoved them aside. No time for that now.

  “Get down!” he shouted to Jaycee, but she was already dropping to the floor. From the sound of it, so were the other two women.