Baby’s Watch

by Justine Davis

  The old pain jabbed him unexpectedly; he’d thought himself done with that long ago.

  “Yes,” he said flatly.

  He heard her suck in a breath. She obviously hadn’t expected his response.

  “Not,” he added, “that I ever knew him. I know who he is, know that my mother was one of many women all over the country. Know that he fathered a few of us he couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge. Know that he’s—”

  He stopped suddenly, shocked at the realization that he’d been about to tell her who his father was. What was it about this woman that had his mind and mouth running in such crazy directions?

  He hastened to rein it in, redirect, something. Anything. “But as far as I know he’s just a sleazebag, not a criminal. Not that it would surprise me, of course, but since I never knew him, it doesn’t bother me much. But your father…”

  He let his voice trail off, hoping she would accept the rerouting of the conversation. Not just to get it off of something he didn’t dare talk about—the famous Colton name—but because he genuinely wanted to know. Which put him even more on edge.

  When she spoke at last, her voice was controlled, level and coolly dispassionate.

  “My father is sophisticated, charming, polished and gracious. He is also arrogant, ruthless and utterly evil. He cares nothing for the law, or for justice, only for his own gains. He controls a network of underlings, who all do his bidding.”

  When she paused at last, he hazarded a guess. “One of them being your fiancé?”

  “Alberto was more of an…associate,” Ana said. A trace of emotion broke through once more as she gave a small, rueful laugh. “At least, that is how he was introduced to me. As a business partner. At the time, I still believed my father was an honorable businessman, who would only deal with other honorable men.”

  “Ana—”

  “I was no more than a pawn to both of them. To my father, to secure what Alberto could offer him. To Alberto, to secure my father’s benevolence.”

  “A bargaining chip,” Ryder said.

  Ana considered this, as if she’d never heard the phrase. Her English was so perfect—better than his, he admitted wryly—she had him thinking about the complexity of idioms, hardly a topic that ever would have occurred to him in his life before.

  Before Ana, that is.

  It startled him that he would even think that way, that even casually he would divide his life into a before and after marked by the simple event of meeting a woman.

  “Yes,” she said after a moment. “As in the days of royalty arranging marriages for their children to political advantage. And my father thought of himself as a kind of royalty.”

  “Sounds more like a mafia don,” Ryder muttered.

  “A…godfather, is it? Yes. That is very like what he is. Except that he has no rivals.”

  Something he realized he should have thought of before now hit Ryder. “How did you get away from him? From them?”

  “I used my pregnancy. They are the kind of men who shy away from anything having to do with such things, anything truly female. When I went to see my physician, I went alone.”

  “They let you?”

  He heard rather than saw her shrug. “They did not know yet that I knew the truth about their dealings. I had only just found out, and I hid it from them while I decided what I must do. Then when I found out I was pregnant, that decision was made for me. I could never bring my child into their world.”

  Strong was too weak a word for her.

  “So you decided to leave not just your home, but your country?”

  “My father’s reach is long,” she said. “So while Alberto was out bragging about his manhood, and my father was lighting candles to ensure a grandson, not an unwanted granddaughter, I pretended to be more ill than I was with morning sickness. They became used to my absence for hours at a time.”

  “You bought yourself a head start,” Ryder said admiringly.

  “When I had done all I could to prepare, I feigned a serious bout of illness on a night when my father was hosting a glittering party. I knew he wouldn’t miss me for hours, probably not even think about me until morning. By then I was far away.”

  Ryder didn’t want to think what a young, pregnant woman must have gone through to get here. Despite her courage, she must have been frightened.

  “Is Ana Morales your real name?”

  “It is, in part. Morales was my mother’s name. I will never again use my father’s.”

  The irony of that bit deep; here they were, two fatherless souls, both using the names of mothers who had loved unwisely, thrown together in the midst of chaos. He had reluctantly gone along with Clay’s change to Colton when the true identity of their father had been revealed, but he often reverted to Grady and was more comfortable with it.

  “And,” Ana added with emphasis, “I am in the process of doing things legally, to become a citizen. Jewel’s family is powerful. They will help.”

  Speaking of the Coltons, Ryder thought wryly. But he pushed that aside for the moment.

  “Maria,” he began.

  “She will never know,” Ana said determinedly. “I will never tell her, about her father or her grandfather.”

  Ryder was grateful he had to pay attention to his driving for a moment, not because there was any traffic at this hour, but because they were nearing the turn they needed. It gave him a moment to ponder what Ana had said, and to wonder if he should tell her about a similar lie in his life.

  And to wonder why he felt compelled to tell her every damn thing that popped into his head.

  Finally, when he’d negotiated the turn and knew they only had a few more minutes to go, he spoke, the words he rarely said coming in a rush.

  “For most of my life, I believed my father was an oil field worker, who died in an oil rig fire before my little sister was born.”

  Ana, as usual, did not miss his meaning. “But this was not true?”

  “No. He was someone else entirely. Someone…wealthy, from a well-known family.”

  “Your mother must have had reason.”

  Ryder shrugged. “She did. We finally figured out that she was trying to protect us, that she knew he would never acknowledge us as his. He is…” He stopped the difficult flow of words, thinking there wasn’t time now to list all the things Graham Colton was. And certainly not enough to list all the things he wasn’t. “It doesn’t matter. Point is, when we—my brother, sister and I—found out it was all a lie, that she’d died never telling us the truth, it was…hard.”

  It had been much more than that, of course. It had been stunning. So stunning that while Clay and Georgie had agreed to meet with the man who had fathered them, the man who had—for some reason Ryder had never trusted—finally reached out to them, Ryder hadn’t wanted anything to do with him. And he was sure the father he’d never met would be happier that way. What Colton would want to acknowledge a reprobate like Ryder anyway? Even a slimeball like Graham Colton would think twice.

  “You think I should tell her that both her father and grandfather are evil, terrible men?”

  “I’m just saying that it was hard enough on us not knowing, and our father is just…pathologically self-centered,” he said, using a phrase Boots had once used. “If your father and her father are as bad as you say, it could be worse for Maria. Maybe even dangerous.”

  Ana went still. “Dangerous?”

  “I just mean that if it was me, and I had some connection to people like that, I’d want to know. So I could watch my back.”

  She said nothing for the rest of the drive, but Ryder could almost feel her thinking. He himself stayed quiet. He figured he’d talked more than enough. In fact, he’d talked about more things to this woman in the short time they’d known each other than to just about any woman he could remember that he wasn’t related to.

  Something about her—

  He cut off his own thoughts when he realized they were nearing their destination. When he’d first suspected
Breither was involved in the ring, he’d cased his home and office. He’d also located and checked out his old home, a vastly different place than the new, expansive, ostentatious residence he lived in now. Sitting regally alone on at least an acre of landscaped grounds, it was the kind of declaration of wealth that had always made Ryder think it would be easier to put up a sign saying “Hey, look, I’m rich!”

  Envy, he’d told himself.

  Recognizing a lack of class when he saw it, was what Boots had called it.

  By then, he hadn’t even seen anything odd in a convicted felon, sitting in a federal prison cell, discussing the finer points of class.

  He parked near the edge of the property in the shadows of a tall pecan tree, something more common up in the hill country. For a moment he just studied the lay of the land.

  He wondered what Ana thought of the place. If her father was as successful at his criminal undertakings as she’d said, she had likely grown up lacking nothing. Had she lived in a home like this one, or perhaps one even larger, more luxurious?

  “Nice house,” he murmured, not really wanting to open that door.

  “Bought with the tears of mothers and babies,” she said sharply.

  “Yes,” Ryder said simply.

  She frowned, and after a moment said, “We must get inside, but how?”

  He withheld any comment on her assumption that “we” would be going anywhere, and answered the last part. “When I was here before, I saw that there’s a guesthouse and a pool with a pool house in the back, that would provide cover almost all the way up to the main house. It’s only the last five yards or so that are exposed.”

  “But surely such a place will have alarms, perhaps dogs or armed guards?”

  Armed guards?

  With the realization that he had just gotten a glimpse into that prior life of hers he’d wondered about, Ryder said only, “No sign of dogs. Or guards. Alarmed, yes. But I can deal with that.”

  He was going to be glad he’d paid attention to his training that day, even if the thought had crossed his mind that being able to break into anywhere might come in very handy after he finished this job.

  “What about others? Family?” She hesitated a split second, as if the idea that such a man would have children of his own was too much for her to conceive of. “Children?”

  “Divorced. He lives here alone.”

  “Smart woman,” Ana said sourly.

  “I’m learning there’s a lot to be said for smart women.”

  His own words startled Ryder; damn, the craziest stuff kept popping out.

  “My father would disagree with you.”

  “His loss,” Ryder said before forcing himself to turn his full attention to the task at hand. “Can you shoot?”

  “If I must. My father had me instructed, for my own safety, he told me.” Her tight smile was bitter. “Another of the many pieces I did not put together until too late, naive fool that I was.”

  “Not too late,” Ryder told her. “You got out.”

  The smile she gave him then would stay with him forever, he thought. He handed her one of the liberated weapons. While she didn’t look comfortable with it, she clearly wasn’t afraid of it. She took a moment to look at it, while he pointed out the safety and told her how many rounds she had.

  In the end, it was easier than he’d expected. Even though Ana insisted on going with him. She’d shown herself nervy enough and willing to let him take the lead. He was the one with the training, she’d said simply, so he hadn’t had to waste time fighting her. They needed to move quickly; it was nearly dawn, a glance at his watch told him they had barely an hour of full darkness left, and what they had to do needed that cover.

  As he’d told Ana, there were no dogs, no guards, but from his earlier surveillance, he noticed an up-to-date alarm system. An up-to-date alarm system that was, amazingly, not turned on. A red light flashed rhythmically, warning that the premises were unprotected.

  So was Dr. Breither lazy, arrogant, stupid…or fiendishly clever? Had he gone off to bed so confident no one would dare mess with him that he hadn’t bothered to set the system? Or was he just too stupid to remember?

  Ana looked at him, and he saw the same questions in her eyes.

  Not that it made any difference. No matter the reason, the answers they needed were inside this house, and there was no other way to get them except to go in.

  At least the door was locked. Had it been open, every instinct Ryder had would have been screaming. But the combination of locked door but alarms not on left that final, most important question unanswered.

  Had Breither been warned despite their precautions?

  And was he smart enough to set a trap?

  He pulled out the small leather case he called his break-in kit. It held a set of finely tempered lock picks, a tiny but powerful flashlight, and for situations that didn’t require finesse, a glass cutter and a small suction cup.

  A glance at the dead bolt told him it was a standard single cylinder, with a flip knob on the other side—cheap, for this expensive house, which said something, he was sure. He could probably pick it in a couple of minutes. But this back door that looked out on the pool area also had a large glass panel, and with the alarm off it only made sense to save that couple of minutes.

  He placed the suction cup, cut around it in a circle large enough to allow his hand through, removed the glass, reached through to the dead bolt and flipped it open. He held back, waiting, watching, in case the apparently inactive alarm was instead an elaborate lure.

  Nothing happened.

  They stepped into the house, Ryder telling himself not to assume that their quarry was as stupid as this made him seem. He couldn’t afford any mistaken assumptions.

  Maria couldn’t afford them.

  Chapter 17

  Ana had not known how she would feel when she faced this man Ryder suspected of being the leader of the baby-smuggling ring.

  She felt utter contempt.

  And disbelief. She was used to her father’s urbane charm and air of strength and power. She had thought it would take at least that to put together this horrible endeavor. Was it truly possible that this skinny, cadaverous man with the beak nose, thinning hair and skittish eyes that refused to look straight at even inanimate objects, was the mastermind behind all this pain and heartbreak and anguish?

  “But he is a cartoon,” she exclaimed. “A caricature.”

  Ryder laughed. Ana liked the sound. An odd thought to have, under these conditions, but there it was.

  It had taken him only a split second to get the locked door open through the hole he’d cut in the glass. They’d gone in quickly, but then Ryder made them both wait, something that went against the grain.

  “Okay,” he had finally whispered. “Not smart enough to set a trap.”

  She hadn’t thought of that, that the disabled alarm system could have been a trap. She added cleverness and quick thinking to her growing list of things she admired about this man.

  And upped her estimate of his courage and determination, since he had gone ahead anyway, even after thinking of the possibility.

  Once inside, Ana had spared barely a glance at the furnishings of the house, thinking only that the entire place looked as if someone had hired a decorator and provided an unlimited budget for ostentation. Even her father had more taste; at least their home, luxurious though it was, appeared lived in.

  The thought of the source of that unlimited budget had made her impatient. It also had her slipping Elena’s knife into her hand once more; the gun Ryder had given her was at hand, but for a man like this she thought she might prefer the knife.

  But now that she looked at him, a silly-looking, quivering man, cowering in the huge, ornate bed in a room that looked more like a high-end brothel, she felt only a pitying contempt.

  “—it wasn’t my idea,” the man was saying his voice taking on a whine as his nervous eyes skipped from Ryder’s weapon to hers.

  “You’re
the last stop on this ugly railroad you’ve built. You’re living—” Ryder gestured at the room “—on the proceeds.”

  “But I don’t run it, I don’t! I just needed the money, I—”

  Ana lost patience. She stepped forward, leaning over the scrawny man as he held the covers with trembling hands, like some frightened virgin, as if they would protect him. Her knife glinted in the light from the overhead fixture Ryder had flipped on when they had first stepped in, startling the man into shocked stillness and giving them the edge.

  Not that they’d needed it.

  “You are unspeakably evil,” Ana said. “You don’t deserve to have ever lived, and certainly not to keep on doing so.”

  “Who are you?”

  It came out as nearly a squeak, and Ryder laughed again. “She’s who you should really be afraid of,” he said. “You messed with the wrong mother, Breither. She’ll carve you up like this silly bed if you don’t talk. And she’ll enjoy it, too.”

  Ana took an inward pleasure in Ryder’s laughing threat, and in the way Breither’s terrified eyes widened. “Mother…?” the man gulped out.

  “I stand for all the mothers you have caused such pain and agony,” she said, getting into the spirit of it. “Which is what I will deal to you in turn.”

  The man’s already pale skin turned paler, and his muddy brown eyes suddenly rolled back in his head. He fell back onto the pile of pillows.

  Ryder reached for him. “Damn,” he said, but he was laughing. “He’s out cold.” He looked at Ana then. “You are amazing. And terrifying.”

  She reluctantly sheathed Elena’s blade. “You do not seem terrified.”

  “I’m a man,” Ryder said, his mouth quirking up at one corner in an expression she found oddly endearing, “not a mouse.”

  He certainly was that, she thought, and again the memory of his bare chest and flat belly flashed through her mind. She guessed that the rest of him was just as masculine, and wished she could some day find out for sure, a longing that startled her with its earthiness and power.