by Toby Neal
Connor’s eyes lingered on the couple’s joined hands, resting in Sophie’s lap close against her waist—so that both of them were touching the tiny one nestled there.
Jake was okay. The child was healthy so far. Sophie was happy.
A deep contentment filled Connor. He was a hawk soaring above, watching for danger and opportunity. Guarding his people. Making things right. He was important and needed. If he was on the outside, he had no one to blame but himself. He accepted that, now.
The performance reached a crescendo as the dancers leaped and landed, in perfect accord, with a thump that rocked the stage.
Wild cheering, louder than a football game, filled the room as the dancers bowed.
Connor twitched in surprise as Sophie touched his hand with her free one. He flicked her a glance: cheeks pink, tears shimmering in her eyes. “Isn’t it incredible?” The sound and energy of the room were so intense that he was reading her lips.
He smiled, gazing at her. “Incredible.”
Turn the page to keep reading book nine of the Paradise Crime Thrillers, Wired Courage!
Wired Courage
Paradise Crime Thrillers Book 9
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
~Lao Tzu
Chapter One
Day One
Discipline was beautiful, even when it hurt.
Pim Wat stood on the stone balcony of the temple overlooking the courtyard. Rows of acolytes, dressed identically in black cotton gi, practiced before their master. The crisp movements of the closely-guarded martial arts routine were already embedded in her own muscle memory, and if she’d joined the young men and women in their tidy rows, she could have performed their routine perfectly, too.
Someone missed a movement, the mistake glaring in the crisp rows of conformity, and the Master raised his baton.
All movement ceased. The rows of recruits froze into stillness. The Master lowered the baton, and the recruits dropped to the ground to do push-ups.
They would do push-ups until he raised the baton again.
Armita appeared at Pim Wat’s elbow. “Your tea, mistress.”
Pim Wat took the hand-thrown porcelain teacup without looking at her maid. She sniffed the jasmine-scented brew, then took a sip. Scalding hot, just as she preferred. “Acceptable.”
She seated herself on one of two chunks of amethyst that had been beveled into stools. A large tiger’s-eye plinth, glowing with bronze iridescence, served as a table. Armita faded back into the building after leaving a lacquered tray holding a pot and another teacup.
Perhaps the Master would join Pim Wat, but he didn’t always. She willed him to, craving the drug of his presence.
The recruits were still doing push-ups. At last the Master raised his baton, and they leapt to their feet in one accord. He barked out an order, and the routine began again. He tapped a student on the end of one of the rows with the baton, handing it over. The black-clad young man took the carved ivory cane reverently, and stepped into the leader’s place in front.
The Master strode toward Pim Wat, and she smiled with satisfaction as he glanced up at her.
Moments later he seated himself on the other chunk of amethyst and picked up his teacup. He closed his eyes to savor the tea, some of the most expensive and exquisite in the world. Pim Wat feasted her hungry gaze on the man that she loved with an unseemly and obsessive passion.
The Master looked no more than thirty, though he was at least Pim Wat’s age. Long black hair, braided and decorated with carved jade, hung down his muscled back. The smooth fans of his lashes rested against golden-skinned, high cheekbones, contrasting with straight dark brows. He opened deep purple eyes that must be the result of some multi-racial encounter of ancestors. “When is she coming to us?”
Pim Wat tightened her mouth in annoyance and hid her expression behind the delicate, hand-thrown cup. “My daughter is stubborn. I’ve told you this.”
“The Yām Khûmkạn requires her.”
“And I’ve told you that she cannot be persuaded. Especially now that she’s pregnant.” Pim Wat’s cup rattled as she set it on the tray. She was going to be a grandmother. What a reminder that time was passing—despite all her efforts, she was getting old. “I have tried everything to get her to come, even threats. She has refused.”
“Does she suspect anything about what we really want?”
“No. How could she? But she does not trust me.” Pim Wat made a fist. “I cannot command her like I used to.”
“You must manage your emotions, Beautiful One.” The Master leaned toward her, but instead of a kiss, he drew a line down her profile with a finger and tipped up her chin. He rolled the ball of his thumb across her lower lip. Pim Wat’s eyes fluttered closed in anticipation and her body trembled. “Take her, if there is no other way. Do what you must do.”
His touch disappeared.
Pim Wat kept her eyes closed for a long moment, still hoping, but when she opened them, he was gone.
“Manage my emotions, by Quan Yin’s left tit,” she snarled. “Armita! My tea is cold!”
Armita came out onto the balcony and whisked away the tea. Pim Wat looked down at the practice area, but it no longer entertained her. She followed her maid into the main chamber of her apartment.
Thick, luxurious carpets and rich silk drapes softened the harsh stone walls and floors of the ancient room. “We must prepare a plan to get Sophie Malee,” Pim Wat said.
Armita’s eyes flashed, just a tiny flare of defiance. “Are you sure that’s a good idea, mistress? She is well protected.”
“The Master wants her, and thus she will come. Once she’s here, they won’t be able to take her back. The stronghold of the Yām Khûmkạn is too remote and fortified.” Pim Wat turned toward a tall, exotic wood armoire. “Back to Hawaii I must go. Such a long, tiresome flight.” Pim Wat pinched the back of Armita’s arm viciously as the maid reached out to open the armoire. “And that’s for questioning me.”
Chapter Two
Day Seven
“Where’s the baby?”
Sophie woke to a gentle shake on her shoulder, a whispered question in her ear. She opened gummy eyes and sat up, her hand falling to her belly—a flat, empty belly, deflated as a balloon with the air let out. She glanced at the empty bassinet beside the bed, then up into the warm brown eyes of her child’s father. “Jake must have her.”
Alika squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll go check. Get some rest while you can.”
Sophie slid back down, her cheek finding the soft pillow as her heavy eyes fell shut.
Her whole body felt like it had been pummeled with rubber hammers. The midwife said it had been a textbook delivery, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been eighteen hours of hard labor that made going ten rounds in a mixed martial arts ring seem lightweight.
Momi Tasanee Wolcott Smithson had been born twelve hours before, two weeks premature but a healthy length and weight. Sophie smiled even as she drifted off, picturing her daughter’s full head of curly black hair, her velvety skin, her tiny fingers and toes with their shell-like nails. Nothing her mother had been through during her pregnancy appeared to have marred Momi’s perfection; the baby was rightly named “pearl” in Hawaiian.
Such a relief. Sophie had never stopped worrying about that ugly first trimester.
Sophie startled awake as the door opened again. She sat up.
Alika and her boyfriend Jake both stood in the doorway, and they both wore identical worried expressions. Sophie’s breasts ached with fullness. “Where’s Momi? I can tell she needs to be fed.”
Jake cleared his throat, advancing into the room to sit on the bed beside Sophie. He slid a hand over her shoulder and drew her close, kissing the top of her head. She leaned into him, and his thickly muscled arm tightened around her.
She smelled an acrid tang on him—fear.
“We can’t find her,” Alika said. “We’ve checked the h
ouse.” He advanced into the room and opened the closet, the bureau, searching restlessly as if he couldn’t stop himself, his big body vibrating with tension.
Alarm flushed through Sophie like a blast of arctic air. She wrenched away from Jake. “What do you mean, she’s gone? I nursed Momi and put her to bed beside me in the bassinet. Jake, you saw me do that. One of you must have picked her up! There’s no one else in the house, right?”
“No one that we know of,” Jake pushed a hand through military-short dark hair, his eyes the color of ash.
Alika lifted the skirt of the bed to peer underneath. “I don’t know what could have happened. Where could she be?”
“What, you think I hid her under the bed?” Sophie’s voice had risen. “This isn’t happening.” She surged out of bed. “There has to be an explanation. I’ll find her . . .”
Sophie was out of the bedroom and running, heedless of pain, of dizziness, of the heavy aching of her breasts as she tore through the upstairs bedrooms of Alika’s showplace of a home, where she’d been ensconced since she’d arrived a week before. Jake tried to calm her and support her, but Sophie batted him aside as she clung to the railing and hurried down the main staircase into the great room of Alika’s mansion.
Sophie checked the living room, the kitchen, the downstairs guest room, the bathroom, the office. Her and Jake’s dogs, Tank and Ginger, nudged and chased her, sensing her distress as she frantically looked for the baby.
“Momi!” Sophie cried. “Momi!”
The baby couldn’t answer. She knew that. She knew it! But Momi was gone! It was impossible but true. Who had taken her? How? Why?
Sophie’s body felt disconnected from her churning mind and flaring emotions—a painful, irrelevant meat-bag that no longer held her precious daughter.
When she’d searched the whole place, run around the grounds and through the four-car garage, Sophie collapsed on the bluestone steps of the mansion, staring up at a deep blue sky filled with Kaua`i’s high white cumulus clouds.
The dogs crowded close, licking whatever bit of bare skin they could reach. Sophie wrapped one arm over her eyes to shut out the light, and the other over her hard, full breasts, feeling wetness saturate the soft fabric of her shirt as her milk let down.
She heard a keening sound off in the distance.
She was the one making that strange cry.
Arms, the heat of a human body, motion, soothing sounds. Jake picked Sophie up and carried her inside. He took her into the downstairs guest room and shut the door. He settled her in his lap on the bed and rocked her as if she were the child, murmuring into her hair, stroking her back. “It will be okay. We’ll find her. She’s going to be fine.”
His mantra helped shut out the terror, the blackness of an unspeakable loss. Sophie closed her eyes and clung to him, breathing in his familiar scent, comforting even when bitter with stress. “She needs me, Jake. And I need her.”
“I know, honey. I know.”
Outside the bedroom, voices—Alika on the phone, then talking to his grandmother, then both of them making calls. The bustle of other humans, searching for her daughter.
Time passed.
Jake whispered in her ear, his arms and body heat surrounding her, warming her. “Did you see anything? Hear anything?”
“No!”
“Could you have . . . sleepwalked? Put her somewhere?”
Sophie recoiled. “No! Of course not! You saw what I saw. Momi is gone! I don’t know how, but she is gone!” She clawed her way out of his arms. That he’d even imagined she had done something with Momi . . .
Sirens. The slam of doors. The dogs barking. More murmuring voices. Thump of feet on the stairs.
The investigators would be checking her room, looking for clues, a ransom note—but there was nothing.
Her baby was just gone, as if she’d never been there at all.
Chapter Three
Day Eight
Connor, aka Sheldon Hamilton, Sophie and Jake’s boss at their private security firm, waited impatiently as his driver Thom Tang parked a Security Solutions SUV behind the police vehicles jamming up the driveway at Alika Wolcott’s Princeville home. He got out of the vehicle and looked back at Thom. “Make sure both the helicopter and the jet are tuned up and fully fueled. We may be leaving soon.”
“You got it, boss.” The Thai man inclined his head. “I’ll call the fuel company right now.”
Connor navigated around three cop cars parked willy-nilly, blocking the driveway. He’d taken the jet from his private island in Thailand as soon as he heard Sophie had delivered the baby early; he’d landed on Kaua`i only to learn that the infant had been kidnapped.
He couldn’t imagine what Sophie, Jake, and Alika were going through when his own shock and fury were so acute—and he hadn’t even met the baby they’d all been looking forward to for so many long months.
Esther Ka`awai, Alika’s grandmother, let him into the mansion. The Hawaiian woman’s face was haggard, her black and silver hair straggling out of a knot at the back of her neck. “Oh good, Mr. Hamilton, you’re here. Jake and Sophie will be so glad to see you, and have Security Solutions help with all of this.” Esther leaned in close, cupping her mouth to whisper in his ear. “The police are acting like Sophie did something to the baby.”
“What?” Connor recoiled. “Obviously this was the work of someone who wishes her harm, and there’s nothing that would hurt her more than losing her child.”
“I know.” Esther smoothed her flowered muumuu housedress with gnarled hands. Her large brown eyes were shadowed, but calm. “I’m glad I told you this, then. The longer there is no ransom note, the more Jake and Alika begin to believe it, as well as the police. Such a thing is like poison in a wound—it enters in small amounts, and spreads to kill.”
Connor stared at the dignified older woman in growing horror. “This will destroy Sophie. I have to get her out of here.”
“You may not be able to,” Esther said, but she was speaking to his back as Connor strode out of the foyer, heading for the mansion’s great room.
Jake, Alika, and several uniformed police officers sat on couches facing each other, with a phone in the middle of the coffee table. Connor swept the room with a glance, taking in coffee cups and a plate of malasadas.
A young blond detective approached him, holding up a badge that identified him as Jack Jenkins. “And you are?”
“Sheldon Hamilton. CEO of Security Solutions, Jake Dunn and Sophie Smithson’s employer.” He pinned Jake with a glare. “Where’s Sophie? Why aren’t you taking care of her?”
“She’s sleeping. Sedated,” Jake said. The ex-Special Forces operative looked pale and somehow diminished. “We couldn’t calm her down. She went a little nuts.”
Alika stood up. He, too, looked exhausted and wan. “We tried everything to get her to settle, but after the police tried to interview her, she went a little berserk.” An amputee, he gestured with his remaining arm to a sideboard covered with smashed crockery and an overturned sculpture.
Connor cursed. “Of course she did! Where is she?” He spun on a heel, looking toward the stairs.
All of the officers stood up and their hands dropped to their weapons. “Stay where you are, sir,” Detective Jenkins said. “This is an active investigation. If you have any information pertinent to the case, we need your full cooperation.”
Connor ignored the man, returning his attention to Jake. “Why haven’t you called Sophie’s friend Marcella Scott at the FBI? Or her father Frank Smithson, the ambassador?”
Jake cleared his throat. “We have confidence in our team here,” he said. His eyes darted to the side, signaling something. He did it again, and Connor spotted a small black device on the small side table—all of this was being recorded.
What could he say to get the police looking in a different direction than Sophie for the baby’s disappearance?
“I’d like to get your statement, sir,” the detective said. “Come into the dining ar
ea with me.”
The baby’s disappearance had to have something to do with Sophie’s terrible mother, Pim Wat, with her ties to Thailand’s version of the CIA. Jake, at least, had to suspect that too, even if Alika didn’t know enough to point a finger in that direction. But these local cops would never believe some far-fetched tale about Sophie’s spy assassin mother without some kind of evidence.
Connor narrowed his eyes at Jake. “When Sophie wakes, tell her I’m here. That I’m very concerned about how her mother will react to this news.” Jake’s shock-dulled eyes opened wider—he got the message. “Also, I want you and Thom to do a foot-by-foot grid sweep of the grounds outside the house. Look for any marks of footprints or a vehicle. The ground is soft from rain—there might be something outside that you missed.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Hamilton. We are in charge of this investigation,” Detective Jenkins said. “Who do you think you are, coming in here and telling everyone what to do?”
“I’m the CEO of a multi-million-dollar security company that specializes in private kidnap rescue, and two of my best operatives were just hit with a crime we deal with every day.” His eyes felt hot as his gaze clashed with the detective’s. “What I can’t understand is a roomful of cops sitting around on their butts, drinking coffee and eating donuts, when a newborn infant has been snatched—and close to both a road and a cliff for easy getaway by car or air. No wonder Ms. Smithson is so upset.”
“The Kaua`i Police Department is in charge of this case. Are you going to cooperate, sir, or do I need to cuff you and take you in officially?” Jenkins wasn’t backing down.
They stared at each other another long minute.
“I’ll cooperate,” Connor said. He turned to glare at Jake, again. “Do what I said, or you’re fired.”