by Linda Conrad
Chance would think he had time now that the original threat had been neutralized. He would believe the immediate danger was past. But still the lawman would act quickly to avoid any further surprise attacks. Jose could bet that the man’s next act would be to move the quarries quickly. Away from the Bar-C. Maybe even out of Texas.
But not tonight. Tomorrow night.
Chance wouldn’t count on the fact that Jose was already in the immediate area and ready to strike again. His guard would be lowered—enough for Jose to take advantage. Tomorrow.
Almost smiling at his tactical superiority, Jose gave another fleeting thought to an alternate plan for holding his position until after the quarries ran again. He was nearly certain he knew where Grace would want to go next. And positive that he understood Chance well enough to be waiting for them when they arrived there. Back in Los Angeles.
And in a few ways an ambush in Los Angeles would be the smarter move for Jose to make. He had a lot of contacts and an entire platoon of his own army living and working in the City of Angels. Clearly he would have the tactical advantage there, even though he had already ordered the execution of his currently useless federal contact. That man was no longer of value. He’d become a liability. Jose had many others who could take his place.
But he didn’t want to wait. Jose wanted to see his son now. It would also be best if he didn’t travel throughout the U.S., even in secret, when he was being hunted by the FBI and the federal Marshals.
No, his mother awaited her grandson in Mexico, and that was where Jose and his son would be. By the day after tomorrow.
The plans had been formulated and were already being implemented. And acting quickly was definitely the smarter move when it came to Grace. A surprise attack again the next day would be unexpected and should yield the easiest and best results.
He wanted his son. Now. And Jose Serrano always got what he wanted.
* * *
Sometime in the dead of night, Grace opened her eyes and blinked at the shadows cast by the nightlight burning in Sam’s room. She turned her head on the pillow and looked straight into Sam’s cool blue eyes looking back at her.
“How long have you been awake?” she whispered. “Have you gotten any sleep at all?”
After the sheriff, Sam’s brothers, aunt and a variety of other ranch hands all left around midnight, they’d stationed a couple of hands outside the doors to keep watch for another attack. But Sam had still seemed edgy when he put Mikey down for the night and insisted she get some rest.
“Caught a couple hours’ sleep,” he told her. “You need your rest. I don’t need much.”
Maybe not, but the wrinkled creases at the sides of his eyes had deepened in the past few hours. He looked drawn and exhausted. She wanted to touch his face and smooth the stress away.
They needed to talk.
Instead Sam was the one to reach out to her. He gently pushed aside a strand of hair so he could lean in and tenderly place his lips against hers.
But the kiss suddenly turned hungry—greedy. The buzzing flurry in her chest instantly burst like a volcano of molten sensations going off. Every inch of her body burned with wanting, ached with longing for his caress.
Her hands went to his hair while his tongue slid inside her mouth. Sweet heaven. Hot agony.
She molded herself to him. Their legs aligned and his hard arousal settled against her soft belly.
Doing anything like this was foolish. They should talk. Or sleep. Despite her current need for rest and whatever came next for them, Sam would soon be going back to his job. Their whole future relationship was only something she’d created in her mind.
But as he touched her, as he kissed her as if he would never have enough, she couldn’t help it. Her entire being centered on the now. She fell into the dream wide awake and forgot all about her reservations.
Already wet and wanting, she slithered out of her panties without breaking the kiss. As if they had choreographed their moves, he eased over her, still without breaking the kiss, and slipped quietly into her welcoming body.
Ah. The feel of him deep within her again was like coming home. She didn’t have experience with any other lover but Jose. And that didn’t count in her mind. But whatever she and Sam had together, however long it would last, it couldn’t be wrong. She’d never felt so right in her entire life.
Leaning up on his elbows, he captured the sides of her head with his hands and gazed into her eyes. “I need you too much.” His raw whisper sent waves of dizzying sensations to every tingling nerve. “I can’t help myself. I won’t let you rest or talk. I want you to distraction.”
He began moving then. Slowly at first. And with each exquisite glide, she lost a little bit of her mind. Writhing under him, she moaned. Called out his name. Begging him to hurry the pace, she felt feverish and impatient.
But Sam never varied the tempo. His patience was maddening. Wrapping her legs around his thighs, she glued their sweaty bodies together and pushed her hips against his in wanton, fierce moves.
At last, when she’d been driven nearly crazy trying to reach that elusive something, the dam finally broke on his control. He cursed, plunged deeper and set a rhythm as wild as a hurricane. She met him stroke for stroke. Dug her fingernails into his shoulders and let herself go to wave after wave of shattering convulsions.
Peaking again and again, she shouted out in accompaniment to his gasping, roaring climax. Afterward she lay there holding him close and sobbing from the loss of breath and the strong emotions lingering in her heart. The exhilaration. The sense of being stripped to the essence of her soul.
But along with all that, also came the terrible, hollow and foreboding sense of coming loss.
* * *
“Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you, did I?” Sam rolled over and lay on his back next to Grace.
She was still crying. More softly now. The sounds something like a whimper. Heartbreaking.
Grace shook her head and sniffed. “You could never hurt me, Sam. You’re a protector. A man born to save the weak.”
“You are hardly weak, Gracie.” He’d never met a woman with so much strength of spirit.
All of sudden what he’d done hit him smack in the face. “Are you crying because I forgot to use protection? I swear, if that causes…if you are…” He couldn’t figure out the best way to put this.
If she became pregnant with his child, he would be thrilled. But how could he tell her that? He had come to love Mikey as his own. Though that didn’t mean he wouldn’t love a baby brother or sister every bit as much. How could he just assume she would want another baby? Or a future with him, for that matter?
Still, Grace’s state of mind continued to be edgy. He could see it in a thousand little ways. And obviously, having a drug lord coming after you was not the very best time to start a new family.
A new family. Was that what he really wanted?
“Please don’t worry, Sam,” she said softly. “It’s not the right time of month. If anything like that were to happen—well, we’d have to decide where to go from there. But this isn’t a good time to be making plans that don’t include Jose Serrano.”
She smiled when she said it, and Sam knew it was her way of diffusing the conversation. But she was right. First Serrano. Then, whatever the future held.
Sitting up against the headboard, she pulled the sheet up under her arms. “Since we’re up anyway, is this a good time to talk? I’ve had an idea about how we can deal with Jose.”
So had he. But Sam was afraid she wasn’t going to like his idea. He could easily imagine that the concept of putting her and Mikey back in WITSEC and then leaving them so he could go after Serrano in Mexico would not settle well. She was too overconfident in her own powers to protect herself and her child.
“Uh…okay.” He scooted back against the headboard beside her and waited for her to go first.
“Well…”
Now he knew he wasn’t going to like the sound of her idea, either.
Setting his jaw and vowing to say nothing until she was finished, he crossed his arms over his chest and gave her room to hang herself.
“Sam, you know Jose has to be stopped. I will never have another moment’s rest until he’s either back in jail or dead.”
So far, they were in perfect agreement.
“And you also know, maybe better than I do, the difficulties of getting to him in Mexico.”
He knew. He also knew it could be done. And he was the best man to capture the bastard. But only if she and Mikey were perfectly safe in the meantime.
“Well…” she began, sounding as if she was about to drop a bombshell on the room.
Here it came. This was bound to be good.
“What would you think of the idea of finding somewhere absolutely safe to leave Mikey. Somewhere Jose would never consider looking?”
“Just Mikey?”
“Yeah, I agree. It’ll be hard for me to leave the baby behind with anybody. He’s so little and there’s not a lot of people I would trust with my son’s life. But I’ve been thinking. What if we ask your brother Travis and your aunt June to take him? I would trust both of them with my life. Mikey’s, too, in case of emergency. Which this is.”
“Uh…”
“Think about it for a moment.” She interrupted his train of thought and went on without stopping to listen to his objections. And he had plenty of objections.
“You and I could make a big show of leaving town with the baby. We could let the word get out that we’re going to L.A. so the baby and I can be placed back into the Security Program. Everyone should buy that. Even Jose. It’s logical.”
Grace stopped to take a short breath and then plowed on. “Secretly we could leave Mikey with June. Just in case we were to be ambushed in the airport on the way to California.”
“Actually,” she added. “I think the baby might be a little safer on the Bar-C. But maybe June wouldn’t mind moving out to Travis’s until Jose is back in prison. It shouldn’t take too long. Maybe a couple of months at most. You could ask her.”
“Well, I don’t know…”
“Wait until I finish, please. See, there’s more to my plan.”
Oh, so now she had a full-fledged plan. Obviously she’d given the idea a lot of thought. He shut his mouth and gave her more rope.
“This is the tricky part. So don’t say anything until I’m completely finished.”
He couldn’t get a word in even if he wanted to. But this ought to be one hell of an idea.
“My idea is for me to lure Jose out of Mexico—using Mikey as bait. I know Jose. He will move heaven and earth to put his hands on his son. He’s so arrogant. He’ll think he can outsmart us and find a way of stealing the baby and taking him into Mexico. And probably killing me.”
Sam looked down between them and discovered he’d covered her hand with his own. Already protecting. Already wanting to keep her from harm.
“I can send him a message,” she went on. “That I’ve had a change of heart and I want my son to get to know his father. Jose is such an egotistical maniac that he would eat that up. And in the meantime, you and the FBI can be waiting to ambush him.”
She heaved a deep sigh. “I’m so tired of being on the defensive where Jose is concerned. Hiding. Scared of every noise. It’s time I became a little proactive.”
Sam knew from the textbooks that a Stockholm syndrome patient taking back a sense of their own destiny was a good thing. A major breakthrough point in their recovery.
So he was glad she’d come up with a plan to eliminate Jose from her world instead of the other way around. And really glad she didn’t want to keep on running for the rest of her life. He didn’t like the idea of Grace contacting Serrano, however. Didn’t like it at all.
Though he had to admit that maybe the idea of surreptitiously splitting her and Mikey up was the best thought she’d had. Serrano would never expect Grace to leave her baby with anyone else. And the drug lord wouldn’t consider looking for the child in a place where he’d already been found, either.
“So, what do you think?” She sounded hesitant. Worried that he would say no.
And he should say no. Hell no. It was too dangerous for her. And he damned sure didn’t want to be separated from Mikey. Not for a minute.
Surprised, he realized that he, too, trusted Travis and June with the baby’s life. Something he wouldn’t have considered only a few short weeks ago. Back then he barely trusted himself. Now family had become his backup?
He’d changed a lot over his time with Grace.
“Let me make a few phone calls.” That wasn’t what he’d wanted to say. “If we do things your way, it will have to be fast. We can’t stay in this house another night. Serrano will have more henchmen heading this way fast if he thinks we’re not running.”
“I hate to leave here,” she said quietly.
Yeah, he did, too. Amazing. He’d been in such a danged big rush to get out of this place as a kid.
“But I’m glad you think my plan has a chance.” She was sounding unsure of herself again.
“You’re positive you can stand leaving Mikey with June and Travis?”
She nodded. But Sam noticed she was much less enthusiastic when it came down to reality.
“Then let’s get a move on. We have lots to do to put your ideas in motion today.”
And he had even more to do if he was going to make two sets of plans. But he had to be sure she would be safe in L.A. He couldn’t take any chances with her life.
Sam didn’t trust Serrano to behave like she expected him to. In fact, he knew the bastard would pull something totally unexpected.
But Sam vowed he would be prepared—for absolutely anything the son-of-a-bitch could throw at them.
Chapter 20
“Turn around and check on the baby.” Sam kept his hands on the wheel and didn’t look toward her to speak. “I want it to appear as though we’re going to visit June before we head out of town to the airport. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s got to look like we aren’t worried about being followed now that Serrano’s men have been captured.”
Grace’s jangled nerves wouldn’t allow her to utter a word. But she swiveled in her seat and pretended to fiddle with Mikey’s seat belt. Only it wasn’t Mikey in the car seat. It was a large baby doll that Sam had rescued from the attic. It wasn’t even Mikey’s real car seat but an ancient one that Travis had kept from Jenna’s baby years.
“I’m not sure I can go through with this,” she told Sam as she righted herself again in the seat.
“What? Leaving the baby with Travis and June? That was your idea, remember.”
She remembered. She’d been kicking herself for making the suggestion all day long. But being separated from her baby wasn’t her biggest worry right now.
“No, it’s not that. I trust your brother and your aunt to keep him safe. But I’m not sure I can be a good enough actress to fool anyone with our charade. All the way through the airport and right up to screening? The idea scares me to death.”
“You’ll do fine. Try to remember how to pretend the way you did in childhood.”
Grace wasn’t sure she did anything remotely like pretending when she was a kid. Every time she tried to think back to those times, her parents came to mind. And that immediately brought up the vision of her mother and father—fighting to get out of their office after the explosion.
Dear Lord, what she had done was horrible. She’d blithely betrayed her loved ones. Without giving it much thought. She had let her anger at them, anger cleverly provoked by Jose, give him the answer to a way in. A way for the devil to destroy everything her family held dear.
Though she hadn’t known her parents would be at the office when it went up in flames, she was still to blame for their deaths. The idea of going back to L.A. to face her memories squarely terrified her.
But she couldn’t let Sam know. This was the best idea anyone had for capturing Jose. And she was definitely the only one who could
coax him out of hiding. Pretending to dangle his child in front of him like a rabbit in a trap waiting for the wolf would do the trick.
Her real child was safe now. And if it meant she had to die to keep him that way and end the threat from Jose for good, so be it. She’d been staying alive for Mikey. And now for Sam.
Sneaking a glance at his profile, she made a promise to herself. Sam could not be hurt during this charade. She knew he thought he was going to capture Jose without her. She could feel it in his responses to his family and to the baby. He didn’t think he was coming back from this trip.
But it was she that might not be coming back. Sam had to live. He would raise her baby as though Mikey was his own. Grace would gladly sacrifice her life for her child’s, but only if she felt assured her baby would be raised with love. Sam would do that. Sam would save her child and give him the kind of life she wanted him to have.
She would find a way to kill the devil. Somehow. This wasn’t a plan for revenge. It was pure, cold logic. As powerful as Jose was, he would never stop until she was dead and he had Mikey. But she vowed he would never have her son. Or the man she loved.
“We’re almost to June’s.” Sam drove slowly down the town’s side streets. “Great timing. It’s dusk. Anyone watching will believe we’re just dropping by for supper before leaving town.”
He’d asked June to spread the word around town today that they would be flying out from the San Angelo airport with the baby tonight. On their way to L.A. Grace wasn’t so positive Jose would hear the news. After all, he was still in Mexico and his men here had been captured last night.
But Sam seemed convinced Jose would know. Sam was no doubt right. The devil had an army of spies stationed in several countries. It wouldn’t be much of a trick for him to have more men around the town of Chance.
“Will you be the one to take the fake Mikey out of his car seat? Please? I don’t think I can do a credible job of it.”
Sam gave her a reassuring smile. “Sure. Don’t look so worried. Everything is going to be fine. You trust me, don’t you?”
