The Wrangler and the Runaway Mom

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “He lied.” The words tumbled out before she stop them. She wanted to beg and plead and throw herself on the devil’s mercy, anything for Nicholas. “I don’t know why, but Michael lied. I don’t know anything about any of this. Please, you have to believe me—I have no idea where any disk is, I swear. Or any money, either.”

  “Then, my dear, I suggest you find it.” The calm, matterof-fact tone chilled her blood more than any threat or angry outburst could have. “You have until tomorrow night, 10:00 p.m. Deliver my merchandise to the rodeo arena entrance and then we’ll see about reuniting you with this charming little boy.”

  He paused, then added in that terrible voice. “At the risk of sounding melodramatic, Dr. Prescott, I really must insist you come alone. If you contact the police or bring McKendrick or anyone else to the exchange, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very happy at all. I might have to take my anger out on both you and your son. You understand, don’t you?”

  His words struck an odd note of discord beyond the icy terror borne by his threat, but she couldn’t think past her fear for her son to analyze what she found jarring about it.

  “I—yes,” she finally said.

  “Splendid. Tomorrow, 10:00 p.m. at the entrance to the arena.”

  For a long time after DeMarranville hung up, she gripped the phone to her ear and listened to the buzz of the dial tone, reluctant to completely sever the only connection to her son.

  She was still standing there several moments later when she heard the rumble of an approaching truck and saw in the moonlight a glimmer of the iridescent paint on the pickup Colt had taken.

  Carefully, slowly, she replaced the phone on the receiver and turned to face Colt.

  He opened the door and climbed to the ground, looking older, somehow, the sunbaked lines fanning out from his eyes more deeply etched. “I lost them, Doc. I’m so sorry.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. She wanted nothing more than to fall into his arms and let him hold her, to take away this pain, but she knew it wouldn’t make it better. Nothing would but the return of her child.

  “Have you heard from DeMarranville?”

  She nodded toward the phone. “Just now. I have until tomorrow night to find the money and the disk.”

  He swore. “Or what?”

  “Or they kill my son,” she said simply.

  “Doc, you know I won’t let them hurt your boy, I swear. I have to tell you—”

  Barely listening, she turned to go toward her trailer. “Thank you for your help, but I need to go.”

  “Where?”

  She didn’t look to see if he followed, just continued walking as if in a daze. “I only have twenty-four hours to save my son’s life. If I’m going to find what Michael stole from them, I have to start looking.”

  Chapter 15

  “It’s after three. You need to sleep, Doc.”

  Without daring to look up for even a moment, she continued digging through Nicky’s suitcase again. “We haven’t found the disk or the money,” she said. Her voice sounded disconnected, as numb as the rest of her. “I can’t sleep until we find it.”

  “It’s not here, Maggie,” Colt pointed out, so gently she wanted to scream at him. “We’ve turned this place upside down at least a dozen times and we haven’t found it.”

  She sat back on her heels and surveyed the wreckage of what had once been her haven, the dingy trailer with the peeling wallpaper and the dark paneling that she and Nicky had turned into a home during the past seven weeks.

  Now it looked like all the pictures she had ever seen of places hit by natural disasters. The contents of the cupboards were scattered everywhere, on the counter, on the floor, on the table. A jumble of plates and toys and clothing covered every surface, as if her trailer had suffered some violent explosion.

  For hours she and Colt had combed through all of her meager belongings again and again, looking for anything out of place. She had even ripped a hole in Nicky’s teddy bear and sifted through the stuffing, but they had come up with nothing out of the ordinary.

  With every moment that passed without their search yielding whatever it was DeMarranville wanted, Nicky seemed to drift farther and farther away from her. She pictured a helium balloon floating higher and higher until it finally passed out of sight, gone forever, and she vowed with everything inside her to hang on to the thin string connecting them, with all her might.

  “Keep looking,” she said sharply.

  “It’s not here.”

  “It is. It has to be here somewhere.”

  “Where? We’ve looked through every inch of your trailer at least a dozen times.”

  “I don’t know, but it has to be here. We’ll find it. We have to.”

  “Maggie—”

  “What do you want me to do, Colt?” She stood up abruptly, clenching her fists. Her voice climbed to a shout as all her pent-up fear and anger came spurting out. “Do you want me to just give up? They have my son. My little boy. Should I just hand him over, without even fighting? What kind of mother would that make me?”

  As quickly as it had come, her anger dissipated, and suddenly she was weeping, huge, wrenching sobs. She clutched her arms to her stomach and rocked back and forth on her heels. “What kind of mother am I to let them take my little boy?”

  “Aw, Doc. Hell.” Through her grief, she felt his arms go around her, and then he was tugging her toward the vinylcovered bench that pulled out into her bed. He sat and pulled her onto his lap, cradling her like a child while she cried out all the fear she had been holding inside her.

  “You’re a good mother,” he murmured softly. “The best mother I’ve ever seen.”

  She was distantly aware of his strong arms around her, his lips brushing against her hair tenderly, and the contact comforted her as much as she would allow it.

  How would she have survived this without Colt here to help her through it? She didn’t even want to think about it, and she was suddenly enormously grateful for his presence, for the strength he offered.

  “You’ll have Nick back, I promise you.” His voice was low, rough in her ear.

  “I’m so afraid, Colt.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “What if I never find what they’re looking for? What will they do to Nicky?”

  He held her tighter. “Sleep, Doc. In the morning we’ll come up with a plan. I’m going to bring in those friends of mine I was telling you about. They’ll help us look for him, I promise.”

  His deep voice lulled her, comforted her. The trauma of the last few hours—added to a seven-hour drive wrestling her truck from the Broken Spur and the sleepless night she had spent in his arms the night before—began to catch up with her.

  She had been existing solely on adrenaline since Nicky had been taken. Now that the rush had passed, she felt battered, achy, as if she had just survived some horrific automobile accident.

  Through the soft cotton of his shirt she could hear his heart beating strong and steady in her ear. She felt her eyelids begin to droop and couldn’t seem to summon the energy to prop them open again. Just for a moment. She only wanted to rest here for a moment, just long enough to regain her strength so she could return to the search....

  Colt watched her lose the battle with exhaustion. Her lids fluttered a few times, her fist clenched the fabric of his shirt, and then she was still.

  He studied the fragile beauty of her face in sleep, and his heart seemed to wrench and tug inside him at the dark circles under her eyes, the frown that stayed on her mouth even in sleep.

  With his defenses down, the guilt he had been holding at bay all evening crashed over him like a tidal wave he’d seen once in the Marines. This was all his fault. He should have told her he was FBI yesterday—hell, he should have told her weeks ago.

  His reasons for withholding the truth had seemed valid at the time, but now they just seemed shallow and selfish, aimed more at protecting himself than in protecting her. If he had come clean she would have been furious, b
ut at least she and the boy would have been in protective custody, out of DeMarranville’s reach.

  Well, she would find out in the morning. In a few hours Beckstead would arrive to head the investigation into the little boy’s kidnapping and the operation to see him safely home.

  He rotated his neck to try to relieve the tight ache there. It helped a little but did nothing for the stronger ache in his chest. Nothing would ease that but the return of her son.

  With small, careful movements, he stood and gently laid her down on the bench, wishing she had thick, soft down to rest on instead of vinyl that was cold and hard. He tugged a quilt off the loft bed and covered her with it and she snuggled down into the folds of the blanket.

  He stood and watched her for several moments, absorbing her features. The pale, soft-blue tracery of veins in her eyelids, the delicate bones in her collarbone, the soft tangles of her hair.

  With slow care, he pushed the hair away from her eyes, his fingers lingering on her skin. It wasn’t right that she had been through so much already and now the worst possible nightmare had come true. He wanted to take it away, to do everything he could to make things right for her.

  He was in love with her.

  The knowledge came out of nowhere and slammed into him so violently he had to steady himself against the wall to keep from falling over.

  He loved her. Her stubbornness, the deep vein of courage running through her, her gentle compassion that reached out to everyone she met. He loved everything about her.

  What m the hell had he done?

  He scrubbed his hands over his face. How could he have been so stupid, let their relationship spiral so far out of his control? He knew something had tugged him to her from the very first, that he had grown to care about both her and her son in a way he hadn’t cared about anybody or anything in a long, long time.

  This fierce emotion choking in his throat went way beyond caring, though, way beyond anything he had ever felt before. It was raw and real and...terrible.

  He loved Maggie Rawlings but it wasn’t going to do him a hell of a lot of good. Sure as snow on the mountains in January, she would hate him in the morning when she found out about his lies.

  Consciousness returned slowly, painfully, like needlepricks of sensation returning to a frostbitten limb.

  Her eyes felt gritty and sore, and every muscle in her body ached and pulled. She lay on the hard bench for a moment, disoriented. She could feel the heavy weight of something terrible on her chest, but for long moments she was unable to figure out what it might be.

  With effort, she blinked away the lingering tendrils of sleep and tried to sort through what was nightmare and what was reality.

  Nicky was gone.

  All the helpless agony of the night before rushed back and she sat up, shoving the covers away. Reality was worse than any nightmare. DeMarranville had her little boy and she had nothing—absolutely nothing—to trade for his life.

  She hadn’t meant to sleep more than a few minutes, but through the little window of her trailer she could see the thin rays of early-morning sunlight filtering through the trees.

  The last thing she remembered was Colt holding her in his arms, telling her they would come up with a plan in the morning. Damn. It was morning and her time was running out.

  It only took moments for her to change into clean clothes, splash water on her face, then hurry outside to look for him. The air was cool, and silvery drops of dew clung to the grass under her feet.

  Most of the rodeo crowd still slept, and the campground was quiet, but as she approached Colt’s camper, she could hear the low murmur of male voices on the other side.

  The friends he said he was calling in to help search for Nicky must have arrived while she slept. Anger flashed through her, hot and sharp. Colt never should have allowed her to sleep so long. Nicky was her son, and she deserved to be a part of any effort to find him.

  Determined to tell him so in no uncertain terms, she round the corner of the camper, then froze, a scream building in her throat and lodging there, choking off her airway.

  There, sitting calmly as you please at a picnic table drinking coffee with the man she loved, were two figures from her nightmares. The two men she had seen from the elevator the night of Michael’s murder, the two who had found her at Rosie’s house.

  Her blood pulsed thickly, sluggishly, and she longed for the illusory safety of the camper. Barely aware of the cold aluminum against her back, she tried to swallow her panic while she scrambled to make sense of what she had seen.

  What earthly reason could Colt have for talking to them? Didn’t he realize they were part of it all? Of course he wouldn’t, she realized. He wasn’t there that night, and he would have no idea who the men were.

  Unless he was one of them.

  The thought sneaked into her mind, ugly and dark, and she thought of the secrets she had always sensed in his eyes.

  No, she couldn’t believe it. Not Colt.

  His low drawl pierced the tumult of her thoughts. “Have you figured out how Damian found her yet?”

  “He just had to sit back and let her make a move.” The older man who looked like a foreign diplomat—or like a clothier at some exclusive men’s store—spoke with a clipped Eastern accent. “The doctor made a phone call yesterday to the housekeeper’s residence and left a message for her. Damian’s people have been watching for it, have been monitoring the phone line. With the phone technology today, a kid could have traced the call.”

  Her stomach quivered. She had caused this, then. By trying to reach Rosie, she had called down the devil.

  The younger of the men, the balding man she thought she had seen that day at the rodeo in Butte, spoke with a derisive sneer in his voice. “If you hadn’t completely bungled this assignment, McKendrick, none of this would have happened.”

  “Back off, Dunbar,” Colt growled.

  “You should have found the stuff days ago.”

  “I searched her trailer just like you ordered, and I came up with absolutely nothing.”

  Searched her trailer? She pressed her eyes tightly shut, trying to make sense of it. That day back in Butte, when she had been so sure someone had been inside the trailer, the invader had been Colt? He had rummaged through her things looking for DeMarranville’s money and files?

  Under other circumstances, she would have been relieved that she hadn’t been imagining things, that she hadn’t just been conjuring up threats that didn’t exist. But all she could feel now was this sharp ache in her chest and the sick roll and pitch of her stomach.

  She had trusted him, kissed him. Made love to him. And all the time he was betraying her.

  “Maybe you didn’t find anything in her trailer because you weren’t looking hard enough. Maybe you were too distracted by the beautiful widow to pay much attention to your assignment.”

  “That’s enough, Dunbar.”

  “No, let him have his say.” The fury in Colt’s voice vibrated through the morning air.

  “Fine. We all know you screwed up,” the younger man went on. “If you had done your job, we would have had the disk and the money days ago and all the information we needed to bring down DeMarranville. By now the lovely widow and her kid would have been in protective custody.”

  Protective custody? Bring down DeMarranville? It sounded like something out of a detective show on television.

  Chaotic thoughts whirled around her like leaves in a chill autumn windstorm, but she couldn’t seem to grab hold of any of them.

  “I carried out this assignment the best way I knew how,” Colt said. “If the Bureau didn’t like the job I was doing, they should have yanked me and put another agent in my place.”

  “Nobody’s saying that,” the older man used a placating tone. “You’re a damn good FBI agent and you know it. This case just got away from all of us. We all made mistakes.”

  Maggie’s eyes flew open and she leaned shakily against the bumper of the camper.

  Colton Mc
Kendrick was a cop. No, an FBI agent. He wasn’t a down-on-his-luck cowboy trying to make a few bucks on the rodeo circuit, he was a special agent sent to investigate her.

  Everything she knew about him—or thought she knew, anyway—seemed to tilt and slide around like marbles in a shoe box. Without thinking beyond the pain, the bone-deep betrayal, she shoved away from the camper and rounded the corner.

  “You lied to me.”

  All three men looked up at her with varying degrees of surprise. Colt’s expression quickly changed to one of wary guilt. “Doc—”

  “Don’t say a word. Not a word. I don’t think I want to hear anything else from you right now.”

  Inside she felt as if she could hear her heart breaking apart, but she hid it behind a facade of brittle control. She turned to the older man, the one who was obviously in command. “You work for the FBI.” It was a statement, not a question.

  The man nodded and pulled a black case from the pocket of his jacket. He flipped it open and to reveal the shield. It flashed in the sunlight and she had to blink away the glare.

  “Lane Beckstead, special agent in charge of racketeering investigations for the San Francisco regional office. This is Agent Dunbar. And of course you know Agent McKendrick.”

  She dared one quick, anguished glance at Colt, then turned back to Beckstead. “What are you doing to find my son?”

  He cleared his throat. “During the night we contacted every hotel along the Wasatch Front without success, I’m afraid. Our guess is they have your son in a private home somewhere in the area.”

  And of course they couldn’t go knocking door to door at every house in northern Utah. “I suppose you know they think I have money and financial records my hus—Michael Prescott stole from them.”

  She couldn’t call him her husband. Never again, even though technically their divorce hadn’t been final at the time of his murder. Because of him—because of his greed, his complete venality—her son was in danger.