by Lisa Childs
Apparently, she had just picked up Thad’s paranoia. At least he had a reason to be paranoid after all those years he’d spent in war zones. The most exciting thing that had ever happened in her life was Thad.
Maybe that was why it had been so hard for her to get over him. So hard that, with a flash of guilt, she acknowledged that she didn’t really want him to show up at the mall. The less she saw of Thad’s handsome face and rock-hard muscular body, the less she had to fight the attraction to him that had only grown more powerful in his four-year absence from her life.
She was so not over him.
Mark tugged at her hand, bringing her attention back to the only man she really needed in her life: her little man. “Your phone’s ringing.”
The jingle bells music playing from the carousel had an echo inside her purse from her Christmas ringtone. She fumbled inside for her cell and pulled it out. The number on the ID screen was unfamiliar. Maybe Thad?
“Hello?”
She could hear no voice on the other end.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
Static or something emanated from the phone, but the music and crowd noise drowned it out.
“I can’t hear you,” she said, then tugged on Mark’s hand to pull him from the line. “We need to go someplace quieter, so I can hear who’s on the phone,” she told her son.
“I don’t wanna lose my place for Santa,” he said, though just a minute ago he hadn’t wanted to even get in line without Thad.
“But this could be your daddy.” If only she could hear….
“I’ll stay right here,” Mark promised.
More static emanated from the cell as someone tried to talk to her.
“Hold, please,” she implored the caller. “Let me get someplace quieter.”
She tugged again on her son’s hand, but he resisted her efforts to move him. “Please, Mommy. I wanna see Santa.”
She glanced at the line, which was hardly moving except that it was much longer now, circling around behind them. With a sigh, she let go of his hand. “Stay right there,” she ordered him. “I’ll just step back until I can hear.”
But the music from the carousel was so loud that she had to step back a few paces before she could hear anything beyond jingle bells. She kept her gaze on Mark, though, where he stood between a mom holding a toddler and a trio of probably ten-year-olds. He looked so small. She waved at him, and he waved back.
“Hello?” she said into the phone again.
But now there was no sound, static or otherwise.
“Thad, is that you?”
The line clicked off.
She held out the phone, so that she could call back the number and find out if it had been Thad calling. Mark was going to be so disappointed if he didn’t show up. Before she clicked the redial button, she glanced back toward the line for Santa.
Her pulse quickened as she didn’t immediately see Mark. Had the line moved? She saw the mom with the toddler and the trio of ten-year-olds standing where they’d been. But Mark was no longer between them. Her heart slammed against her ribs as fear overtook her. Pushing people aside, she ran toward the line.
“Where did the little boy go?” she asked the woman with the toddler.
The lady glanced down as if just realizing that he was gone. “He’s not with you?”
Tears stinging her eyes, Caroline shook her head. She grabbed the shoulder of one of the older kids. “Did you see my son?”
The kid stared up at her.
“The little boy who was standing behind you in line,” she clarified.
The kid glanced back and shrugged. “I didn’t notice him.”
She turned to his friends. “Did either of you see where he went?”
Both kids stared at her like she was crazy and then finally shook their heads.
Where had he gone?
Fear choking her, she could barely manage to whisper his name. “Mark…” Then she gathered her courage and yelled, “Mark!”
The music from the carousel drowned out her voice. “Mark!” She pushed through the crowd, frantically searching for him.
Had Thad shown up and taken off with him somewhere? Even though she would be furious with him, she hoped to God that was the case. The Christmas mob was so large that she struggled to push through, let alone find a security guard. She needed to find the information desk. She needed to get help finding her son.
“Mark!” Strong arms grasped her shoulders and spun her around.
“Caroline, what’s wrong?”
Relief shuddered through her at the sight of Thad’s handsome face, his blue eyes full of concern. “Thank God you’re here.”
She glanced down, but no little boy stood happily at his daddy’s side.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said.
Panic chased away her momentarily relief. “Where is he?”
“Who?” Thad looked around her, and then his brow furrowed as he realized exactly who was missing.
“Mark,” she said, her voice breaking on a sob.
The color drained from his handsome face. “He’s not with you…?.”
“No,” she admitted, her voice rising with hysteria “He’s gone.”
She had spent those sleepless nights worrying about allowing Thad a relationship with their son. She’d been concerned that he would fail as a parent and hurt her sweet baby boy.
But she was the one who’d failed as a parent; she was the one who’d lost their son.
“He’s gone…?.”
His father hadn’t taken him.
So who had?
Chapter Five
“I thought it was you on the phone, but I couldn’t hear,” Caroline said, her voice shaking with fear. “So I backed away from the noise of the carousel. But I kept my eyes on him.”
She stared at Thad with eyes that were wide and wet with terror. “I could see him at all times. I only glanced down at the phone for a second. And then he was just…” A sob slipped out of her lips. “Gone.”
Thad wrapped his arm around her, holding her close to his side as she relayed the information to him and the security guards he had summoned to search the mall for the missing child.
“We’ll find him,” he assured her.
Thad had convinced the head of security to lockdown the mall so that no one could leave. Mobs had formed at the doors, protesting the imprisonment. He only hoped it wasn’t too late.
“How long ago did you lose sight of him?” he asked. Long enough that someone could have taken their son outside already?
Despite the watch on her wrist, Caroline grabbed her phone from her purse. “Just minutes after the time this call came in.”
Thad took the phone from her and noted the time. Because of the throng of shoppers, he had struggled to get through the mall at more than a snail’s pace. That was why it had taken him so long to find Caroline—that and his reluctance to even step inside a mall full of Christmas decorations and music.
Guilt and anger at himself gripped him. If only he hadn’t acted like such a fool.
His emotions must have shown on his face, because Caroline reassured him now. “We’ll find him.”
“Whose number is this?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear who was talking. I thought it was you, calling to say you weren’t going to make it.”
He nodded. She’d already said that she hadn’t thought he was going to come. When he had promised Mark that he would, he had seen the doubt on her beautiful face. She had thought then that he was lying to their son.
“Was Mark upset that I wasn’t here?” he asked, worried that the boy had thrown a tantrum because Thad had been late.
“No.”
Now he suspected she was lying.
“He was really anxious that he might not get to see Santa. That’s why he didn’t want to move out of line when I got the call.” Tears streaked down her face. “I never took my eyes off him but for that one second…?.”
A second was all it took for a bomb to destroy an entire village. He had seen it too many times, but he couldn’t share that horror with Caroline.
“Has the St. Louis Police Department been called?” Thad asked the head security guard. He was in his fifties with a buzz cut and ex-military demeanor. Despite the fact that the boy might have just wandered off, the man had still sent his guards off with urgency to look everywhere for Mark. “My brother is Detective Ash Kendall—”
“You’re Thad Kendall, the reporter,” the head guard, Ron Thurston, interrupted. “I’ve seen you on the news.” He probably wasn’t talking about Thad’s special reports on ZNN but rather the local reports about the shooting and the Christmas Eve Murders.
“Do you think the police need to be called?” Caroline asked, her face turning stark white as horror widened her tear-reddened eyes. “Do you think someone has kidnapped him?”
“We need to find him as soon as possible,” Thad explained.
She blinked as if to dry her eyes and stared hard at him. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I can’t,” he admitted, frustration eating at him. “I don’t know.”
“It’s a possibility,” the guard remarked, “given who you are.”
“Has the entire building been searched?” Thad asked.
He needed to do it himself. He couldn’t trust these guards to have conducted a thorough search. The ones under Ron were just kids, probably high-schoolers with no guns or badges or any real authority. He couldn’t even trust his brother.
He reached for Ron’s shoulder to guide him away from Caroline so that he wouldn’t mention anything else about ransom within her hearing. “Show me where the public can’t access—”
Caroline clutched his arm, holding him back from heading off with the guard. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to look for him,” he said. “You stay here, where you were supposed to meet me.” By the carousel, where he would have found them had he showed up when they’d planned.
Caroline nodded. “I’ll wait for him…and you…here.” Before she released him, she squeezed his arm hard. “Find our son.”
“I will,” he promised.
Leaving her wrenched his heart. She turned toward the carousel, and her shoulders shook with sobs. He had managed no more than a few steps away from her when he heard a voice call out.
“Mommy, don’t cry…?.”
He turned back in time to see Caroline drop to her knees and throw her arms around their son. When he hurried over to them, Mark glanced up from his mother’s shoulder. “You’re here now, Daddy.”
It was the first time his son had called him…anything to his face. Like Caroline, Thad felt like crying, too.
“Where were you?” Thad asked. “Were you looking for me?”
Had he caused this whole nightmare?
Mark shook his head. “I was waiting to see Santa but someone grabbed my hand.”
Alarm kicked Thad’s heart rate into overdrive. “Who grabbed you?”
Mark shrugged his thin shoulders. “I dunno. I didn’t really see him. He was very tall, and the mall was so crowded that people were jammed in all around us.”
And the boy was too short to see much above anyone’s waist.
“But you know it was a man?”
“His hand was big,” Mark replied, “like yours.”
Thad settled his hand, which was shaking, onto the little boy’s head. “Did he hurt you?”
Caroline gasped as she realized what Thad was really asking their son. She pulled back from the little boy and studied his face. “Are you all right?”
“I’m good.”
“Is he okay?” the head security guard asked, concern in his voice.
With a glance, Thad deferred to Caroline. She knew their son best.
She nodded.
“So we can open the doors?” the guard asked Thad, deferring to him.
He hesitated because he wanted to pull every man into a lineup for his son to pick out his almost-abductor. “You really didn’t see his face?” he asked the boy.
“No. He was wearing those kind of light-colored pants.” He glanced at Thad’s khakis. “Like yours.” And probably half the other guys in the mall.
The guard must have come to the same conclusion because he said, “He’s okay. Probably someone just accidently grabbed the wrong kid. This place is a zoo tonight, and if we don’t open those doors soon, we may have a riot.”
Thad sighed. He had no right to hold the entire mall hostage, and if he wasn’t a Kendall, the guard would probably have not even agreed to the lockdown in the first place.
“Yeah, go ahead.” He reached out his hand and shook Ron’s. “And thank you for your fast response.”
“I have five grandkids,” the guard said with a grin. “I would have been going crazy, too, if one of them went missing.” He headed off, his radio at his mouth.
Despite the crowded mall, the three of them were suddenly very alone and very quiet as all the nerves gave way to relief and shock.
Mark glanced from his mother’s face to Thad’s, and then his bottom lip began to tremble as he realized the extent of their concern. “Am I in trouble?”
“No,” Thad assured his son. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You weren’t supposed to leave the line,” Caroline corrected them both. “Why did you let the man pull you away?”
The little boy’s face flushed with bright color. “I thought the man was—” he turned back to Thad “—you.”
“I wouldn’t take you anywhere without telling your mother first,” he said.
“I pulled away,” Mark said, “when I saw it wasn’t you.”
“You saw his face?” He glanced in the direction in which the guard had walked off, thinking about calling him back to keep the doors locked.
“No,” Mark said. “But he was wearing gloves.” He touched Thad’s bare and cold-chapped hands. “And you always forget to wear your gloves.”
A giggle slipped from Caroline’s lips at the boy’s precocious observation.
“How did you get away from him?” Thad asked, his guts too tense to find any amusement in the situation. He wasn’t as convinced as the guard that someone had just grabbed the wrong kid.
Mark shrugged. “I pulled loose. But it’s so crowded I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t find you, Mommy.” His breath hitched, and his lip trembled more. “I kept looking, but it was so busy.”
Caroline wrapped her arms tight around the little boy. “You found me. You’re safe now,” she assured him and herself.
“How did you find us?” Thad asked, wondering if the man who’d grabbed him had led him back to the carousel. Then it might have been just an honest mistake.
“I heard the merry-go-round and kept coming to where it got louder.”
Damn. Now Thad was going to have to start liking Christmas music again. It had led their son back to them.
His hand shaking harder, he barely managed to gently pat the boy’s head. “You’re so smart.”
Mark blinked up at him, as if the compliment alone had brought him to tears. He flashed back to his father complimenting him once, on a story he’d written in elementary school. Because his father was always so busy and distracted with business, the fact that he’d read the paper had been compliment enough, but then he’d told Thad that he’d done a good job. Effusive praise it wasn’t, but Thad had been moved to tears, too.
He vowed then that he would be a better father. He would praise his son so much that a compliment wouldn’t overwhelm the boy. And he would never again disappoint him as he almost had tonight. If the man who’d grabbed him had really intended to kidnap him, Thad might have lost him.
And if he lost Mark, he would lose Caroline, too. She loved their son so much. Like she had, Thad dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around them both—holding them close to his madly pounding heart.
THE LITTLE BOY SLEPT peacefully, his lips curved into a swe
et smile as if he dreamed only happy dreams. Caroline wouldn’t sleep at all tonight. She wouldn’t dare to even close her eyes for fear of reliving those nightmarish moments when Mark had been missing. Images of what could have happened kept flitting through her mind even with her eyes wide-open, though.
As she turned down the brightness of the lamp next to his bed, she studied the picture propped up against the fire-engine base of the lamp. That was what had brought the smile to her little boy’s face.
His dream.
The picture wasn’t just of him sitting on Santa’s lap but of Caroline and Thad kneeling next to him as he told the costumed mall worker what he wanted for Christmas. In order to make the night less traumatic for Mark, they’d let him talk to Santa. And the other people, knowing that the boy had gone missing for a while, had let them cut in line. So the little boy had gotten his picture with Santa—the picture he wanted to be a reality.
A family.
While tonight had had a happy ending, Mark’s dream wouldn’t. It would never be realized…at least not with Thad. After one lingering gaze at her son, she left the room and headed down the stairs to where Thad waited in the living room.
He had shut off the lamps, so that the only light came from the fire flickering in the hearth. But he hadn’t dimmed the lights to seduce her. He didn’t even turn toward her. His entire focus was on the street outside the window in front of which he stood.
“You don’t believe it was an accident tonight,” she said, “that some dad or grandpa grabbed the wrong kid in the crowd.”
“I have no reason to think that isn’t exactly what happened,” he replied, and he finally turned away from the window.
She walked up to it now, but she could only see her own reflection in the glass. Dark circles rimmed her eyes; they were the only color in her pale face.
“What does that mean?” she wondered. “That you don’t see anyone out there? That no one’s made any threats?”
