First-Class Father

by Charlotte Douglas

  “I was afraid.” His brown eyes glowed like ebony in the soft light, his expression as serious as she’d ever seen it.

  She sat upright in surprise. “Dylan Wade, I’ve never known you to be afraid of anything.”

  A haunted look filled his eyes. He pulled her against him and held her as if he feared she’d try to leave. “You’re my best friend. I don’t want anything to spoil that.”

  “What made you decide to risk it now?”

  “They taught us at the police academy to banish our fears by facing them. I decided it was time to face this one.”

  “And is it banished?”

  He cradled her face in his hands and lowered his lips toward hers with a teasing smile. “Not yet. I’d better face it awhile longer.”

  Over the next few years, their love had grown, never detracting from their friendship.

  “We’re almost there.” Dylan’s voice jerked her back to the present.

  The horrible reality she had held at bay with her fondest memories returned, clawing at her like a rabid beast, and she choked back a strangled sob.

  My baby!

  They’d left the interstate and were driving through the North St. Petersburg neighborhood where she lived. Dylan turned onto her street and pulled into her driveway. The sight of Chip’s swing on the front porch stabbed her with fresh pain and guilt.

  “How could I have allowed someone to take my child? Why didn’t I fight harder? I should have scratched his eyes out or—”

  “Stop it!”

  The harshness in his voice shocked her into silence. She’d never heard him use that tone before.

  “You’ll make yourself crazy with should-haves.” He softened his voice, and the warm compassion she remembered lit his face as he turned off the engine and unfastened his seat belt.

  She longed to fall into his arms, to feel the security of his embrace, but she’d given up the right to that reassurance two years ago. All she could ask now was his help.

  “What should I do?” She didn’t try to conceal the desperation in her voice.

  “Go inside and wait in case the kidnapper tries to contact you.”

  Her heart beat as if trying to escape from her body. “You’re not leaving?”

  The chiseled planes of his face settled into severe lines. “I’m staying until I’ve convinced you to contact the police.”

  She sighed with relief Her control, like a delicate sheet of crystal battered by a high wind, threatened to shatter any second. Dylan was the glue that held her together, however tenuously. She’d fall apart without him, and then she’d be no use to Chip at all.

  On trembling legs, she climbed the front steps and, trying not to think of Chip’s happy giggles when they’d left earlier, unlocked the front door.

  “Wait.” Dylan grabbed her arm and stopped her from stepping across the threshold.

  “What?”

  “Do you have a handkerchief?”

  She fumbled in her purse for a fresh tissue and handed it to him. He knelt on the mat, reached inside to the floor of the front hall and picked up a white, unmarked envelope that had been thrust through the mail slot. With the tissue, he gripped the letter gingerly between his forefinger and thumb, nudged her ahead of him into the house and closed the door behind him.

  Her unsteady legs threatened to collapse, and she sank onto the parson’s bench near the door. She had already guessed the letter’s origin, and she dreaded its message.

  Dylan took a letter opener off the hall table, slit the envelope and removed and unfolded the single sheet, taking care to handle it by a corner.

  “It’s from the kidnapper.” His professional composure slipped briefly to reveal a flash of stark anger.

  “He knows where I live.”

  Dylan nodded grimly. “He could have been following you for days without your noticing. Or he could be someone you know.”

  “What does the note say?”

  “He wants a ransom.”

  “Ransom?” The word erupted from her constricted throat in a hoarse whisper.

  “For ten thousand dollars, you can have your son back.”

  Chapter Two

  “I don’t have ten thousand dollars.”

  Heather slumped against the back of the bench as if someone had removed her bones. Sobs shook her slender shoulders, but she made no sound.

  Her collapse rattled Dylan to the core. In all the time he’d known her, she had never yielded to calamity. She had always been a pick-yourself-up-and-meet-it-head-on kind of girl. Challenges or adversity had only stiffened her backbone and hardened her resolve. The quivering woman on the bench was a stranger.

  He gave himself a mental shake. Who knew how he would react if his child had been kidnapped?

  He sank onto the seat beside her, pulled her into his arms and smoothed her hair. “Let me call the St. Pete PD. Maybe there’s still time—”

  “No!” She wrenched away and sprang to her feet. “He’ll kill Chip.”

  “It could have been an empty threat—”

  “I heard him. He meant what he said.”

  Dylan sighed, torn between duty and—he’d almost thought love. Maybe his feelings were an echo of what had been, like a photograph of a time long past He shouldn’t care for her, not after she’d walked out without a word, refused to answer his calls, returned his letters unopened. She had cut him out of her life as ruthlessly and completely as a surgeon excises a tumor.

  He shook his head. “The kidnapper wants you to believe him. He may have no intention of harming your boy.”

  “May I see the note?” She held out her hand for the paper he still grasped between his thumb and index finger.

  Reluctantly, he passed it to her.

  She scanned the contents hurriedly and her anger blazed anew. “‘Don’t contact the police if you want to see your boy again.’ He repeats the warning right here.”

  The intensity of her fury startled him, but her ferocity, like that of a lioness defending her cub, was better than her despair.

  “The kidnapper may harm the boy whether you go to the police or not,” he said gently. “With the cops looking for Chip, he’ll have a better chance.”

  “Do you really believe that?” She fixed him with an unblinking stare, and he resisted the urge to squirm.

  His mind worked frantically, reviewing what statistics he could dredge up about child abductions. The advisability of bringing in the police was a tossup. He remembered cases where brilliant detective work or a wide-flung dragnet had returned children safely to their parents in a matter of hours. He recalled just as many that had ended in disaster. “You’re his mother. It’s your call.”

  A guilty expression flitted across her face before determination replaced it. “No cops. Not yet.”

  He pushed to his feet and rammed his hands in the back pockets of his jeans to keep from reaching for her. Old habits died hard. And with her refusal to bring in the local police, he’d have to fight those old habits awhile longer.

  A shudder jolted him. She obviously no longer loved him, but how much would she hate him if he was unable to rescue her child? “Do you intend to pay the ransom?”

  She was making a valiant attempt at composure. With her chin jutted forward and her lips clamped in a hard line, she nodded. “I can borrow from the credit union. I don’t have that much in savings.”

  “I’ll make coffee,” he said. “You call the credit union.”

  Without waiting for her agreement, he strode to the kitchen. Funny how familiar her house seemed, as if he’d last visited there only yesterday instead of more than two years ago. He remembered Heather using her parents’ graduation check for the down payment. She’d been ecstatic.

  He’d been horrified. The house had been advertised as a handyman’s special, which meant, essentially, it was a wreck. But Heather hadn’t taken long to whip the place into shape. She’d generated the energy of a nuclear power plant, teaching high school history classes all day, then working late into
the night stripping wallpaper, painting woodwork and sanding floors. The only times he had witnessed her truly at rest were those too-few quiet moments when she stopped her frenzy of activity to nestle in his arms.

  Those memories brought more pain than he was willing to admit, and he smothered them as he reached automatically into the freezer where Heather kept her coffee.

  She followed him into the kitchen and opened a drawer beneath the wall phone. After extracting a directory, legal pad and pen, she placed them on the kitchen table beside the ransom note.

  With the quiet efficiency of the Heather of his memory, she sat at the table, opened the phone book and began jotting notes on the pad. Sunlight streamed through lacy ferns hanging in the tall windows above the sink and kindled golden highlights in her hair.

  Observing her in the peaceful kitchen with its pale cream cabinets, polished pine floors and the aroma of brewing coffee stabbed him with the magnitude of all he’d lost, not only Heather, but the home they could have made together. Forcing sentiment aside, he reached into the refrigerator for the milk he remembered she took in her coffee. On the door, fastened by colorful magnets, were three of her latest to-do lists. Her obsession with organization hadn’t changed.

  Lower, at toddler-height, were crayoned drawings, indistinguishable squiggly lines and sweeps of color displayed as proudly as the most venerated masterpieces. He recalled the toys in the car and the swing on the front porch and wanted to put a face to the little boy who used them. “Do you have a picture of Chip?”

  Reaching for the phone, she suspended her hand in midair at his question. Her expression had shifted at his mention of her son. After a brief hesitation, she said, “There’s a photo on the mantel in the living room.”

  While the coffee brewed, he went to the living room and took a framed eight-by-ten from above the fireplace. In the vivid color portrait, an appealing towheaded toddler with a heartbreaking smile clutched a large stuffed dog beneath a Christmas tree. Dylan could almost hear him laugh. He had his mother’s eyes and sweet mouth. The strong jaw must have come from his father.

  Something significant about the photo niggled at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t capture it.

  He checked the mantel and tabletops for pictures of the dad, but the only other photo in the room was one he remembered of the Taylors, taken on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. He glanced again at the picture he held. Chip was no longer an abstract, a faceless kid. He was a real person who swung on his front porch and ran his trucks across the kitchen floor while his mother fixed dinner.

  Dylan replaced the color photograph on the mantel and reached deep inside for that emotionless objectivity that helped him do his job unfettered. He couldn’t find it. Instead, even when he turned away, all he could see was a little boy with his mother’s smile.

  Anger boiled where detachment should have been. If Heather had loved Dylan as much as she claimed, how could she have turned to someone else so soon after leaving him?

  Unless she’d been seeing Chip’s father all along.

  He stomped back to the kitchen.

  Heather braced herself against the counter with the phone pressed to her ear. “You’re sure?” Color drained from her face. “Thank you.” She hung up the receiver, swayed and gripped the counter’s edge.

  “Two days,” she murmured, looking ready to faint.

  He rushed to her, eased her into a chair and thrust a mug of steaming coffee into her shaking hands.

  “Drink,” he ordered.

  She gulped black coffee and grimaced, but her color returned. Satisfied her light-headedness had passed, he thrust milk and sugar toward her, filled his own cup and sat opposite her.

  “What’s this about two days?” he asked.

  Her fingers, long and tapered with pale oval nails, tightened around the ceramic mug. If the cup had been porcelain, it would have shattered from the pressure. “Two days from now is the earliest the credit union can approve a loan, even with my financial statement on file.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “Fifty-five hundred.”

  “What about a cash advance on your credit card?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  He should have known. She’d always been fiercely independent and amazingly frugal. The writers of The Tightwad Gazette had nothing on Heather. She could save circles around them. The only items he’d ever known her to buy on credit were her house and car. For anything else, if she didn’t have cash, she did without.

  His anger rekindled, this time at Chip’s father. Hadn’t the guy ever heard of life insurance? But raging at the dead would get him nowhere.

  “What about your parents?” he said. “Can’t you ask them? They could wire the money from Fort Lauderdale.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to tell them unless I have no other choice. Dad’s bad heart might not stand the strain.”

  “I have some money,” he said, surprising himself with the suggestion. “You can borrow what you need from me.”

  Tears misted her eyes and she ducked her head over her cup. “Thank you.”

  He had the money, and more, and he needn’t worry about her paying him back. Heather would work three jobs rather than remain in debt It wasn’t the money he was worried about, but the thought of a helpless little boy who might not be returned even if the ransom was paid and what losing him would do to Heather.

  Dylan winced inwardly. No matter how she’d treated him, she didn’t deserve this.

  As if reading his mind, she lifted her head and met his gaze. “The money is what he wants, isn’t it?”

  He drew a deep breath, weighing his answer. “When it’s the child they’re after, for whatever reason—”

  Her breath hissed through her teeth, and her face turned pale again.

  Damn fool, he told himself, watch what you’re saying. Her imagination is torturing her enough without you provoking it.

  “When it’s the child they’re after,” he began again, “they don’t send ransom notes. The fact that Chip was taken, apparently at random, and that the ransom demand is small, probably means someone’s desperate for money and kidnapped Chip as a means to an end.”

  “So if I pay the money, I’ll get him back?” Her eyes pleaded with him to reassure her.

  Please, God, make it so, he prayed, and settled for an ambiguous encouragement. “This time tomorrow, this nightmare will be over.”

  She flashed a wavering smile. “We’d better head for the credit union. I have a withdrawal to make.”

  She stood and smoothed her dress over her thighs, and he noted the trembling in her hands. Her bravery rebuked him. In his anger and pain at her desertion, he had wanted her to suffer as he had, but never in his wildest, hottest rage would he have wished this agony on her.

  A cold fist of apprehension gripped him. Her present suffering was nothing compared to what it would be if she didn’t get her baby back.

  HEATHER SCANNED HOUSES as Dylan drove past, searching for a white car in the driveways and any sign of a little boy with white-blond hair and hazel eyes. The cashier’s check for forty-five hundred dollars was tucked in the purse on her lap. Later, Dylan would take it to his bank, withdraw the balance needed and ask for ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills, just as the ransom note demanded. The note instructed her to deliver the money, alone, to an abandoned packing house in a citrus grove north of Dolphin Bay at nine o’clock that night. The kidnapper promised to exchange Chip for the cash.

  She glanced at her watch before returning her attention to the middle-class homes with neatly trimmed yards. Ten hours to go. She bit her lip to force back tears. Ten hours was an eternity for a little boy, crying for his mother. And for his mother, as well.

  Dylan had suggested a sweep of the neighborhoods surrounding the day care center on the chance the kidnapper lived close by. At least, that’s what he’d said. She suspected he had invented the search to give her something to do to prevent her falling to pieces until
time to deliver the ransom.

  A glance revealed the set of his square jaw, where a small ticking muscle divulged his tension. Only two things had ever disturbed Dylan’s easygoing manner—flagrant lawbreakers and people who hurt others. Yet even when provoked by criminals or cruelty, Dylan never lost his cool. She had witnessed him, calm and professional, wading into a slugfest between two combatants and bringing order out of chaos without so much as raising his voice.

  Sitting beside her now, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, muscles taut like a wildcat ready to pounce, he was angrier than she’d ever seen him. But was she or the kidnapper the source of his outrage?

  And if he was provoked at her now, how furious would he be if he discovered how she’d lied to him? She clutched the shoulder harness until it bit into her skin. As hard as she’d tried, she couldn’t help her attraction to him, but she couldn’t change the way things were between them. If he helped rescue Chip, she would disappear from his life again, before he caught on to her deception. All that mattered now was her son.

  “What did you tell the school?” An echo of his anger, like the rumble of distant thunder, underlaid Dylan’s deep voice.

  Worry for Chip had forced any thought of work from her mind until a few minutes ago, when she’d asked Dylan to stop at a pay phone for her to make a call to the high school office.

  “I didn’t tell them anything, except that I was taking some personal time. Today’s the last day before vacation, and I’ve turned in my grades. My textbooks are inventoried and my classroom’s in order…”

  She was babbling, but she couldn’t help it. If she didn’t keep talking, she’d cry, and she couldn’t help Chip if she was bawling her head off.

  She sensed Dylan’s tension ease, and he reached for her hand. She loosened her death grip on the shoulder harness and slipped her fingers into his. The warm pressure of his callused palm was like a life-line. She could get through this, she promised herself, she’d have her boy back, as long as she had Dylan and his quiet strength to hang on to.

  “I don’t think this search—” with her other hand, she made a sweeping gesture that took in houses on both sides of the street “—is doing any good. I can’t tell one white car from another, and the kidnapper wouldn’t take Chip out in the open where he could be spotted.”