“Thanks for the help.”
“Beck, there’s more to life than the dark side you infiltrate. There is so much good in the world, too. You just have to open yourself to it. Take this break and find some of it. Seek it out the way you hunt down the bad.”
Not bad advice, but right now he had another bad man to find and put behind bars. “I’ve got a different kind of mission right now.”
“I’m worried about you, Beck. You sound too close to the way you did when we met.”
He’d been desperate to get out from undercover. He’d been in too long and saw the danger closing in and knew it would all end badly. It almost did. If not for Sadie, he’d be dead.
“I need to take care of this, then everything will be fine.”
Sadie’s soft sigh told him even she didn’t believe that empty statement. One misstep and he could put Ashley and Adam in danger again. Hell, the bastard who hurt them was still out there, free to do as he pleased. Trigger worried about what he was planning even now.
Chapter Twelve
Brice stared out the window at the thick blanket of snow on the ground and the millions of flakes still coming down and cursed the storm, his luck, his life. He’d barely slept for the nightmares and questions plaguing him.
Where is she?
What happened to her?
Is she still alive?
Is she out there freezing and begging for me to come for her?
With her strength and determination, and just pure stubbornness, he knew she could make it. She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. He’d know. He’d feel it.
He needed to find her and bring her home where she belonged.
“Brice!” Darren called his name like he’d said it several times already.
Brice turned from the wall of white out his windows to his pet assistant. “What?”
“Any news?”
“Nothing,” he bit out, wanting this agony to be over. Without her, he felt incomplete. If only he could find her, he could set things right again. She didn’t know what she was doing. The connection they formed overwhelmed her. She needed time to accept. Once she did, she’d want to come back to him.
Brice turned the laptop on his desk around to show Darren the map he’d pulled up. “We know she didn’t take the road.” They’d driven up and down the road in the early morning light despite the treacherous icy conditions. They’d put the four-wheel drive to the test. The hair-raising experience left him reasonably sure she hadn’t gotten to the road and flagged down another car. “There’s a property on either side of my land.”
Darren pointed at the phone. “So, call the neighbors.”
“I want to see their faces in case they try to lie.”
“You’re exposing yourself by going out and looking for her, alerting people that she’s been hiding here. We’ll use the boy. Where is Jackie? With her help, we can call the cops and say Adam went missing and get local help. Find Adam, find Ashley. Then spin the story about Ashley to our advantage.”
Brice glared at Darren. “Jackie is gone because she didn’t know her place or when to keep her mouth shut.”
Darren sucked in a breath understanding what Brice meant.
“If you don’t help me fix this and find Ashley, you’ll be gone, too.”
Chapter Thirteen
Trigger took a breath and a minute before he made the call to Deputy Mark Foster. This one call opened up the can of worms Ashley wanted to keep sealed. As much as he’d like to keep her and Adam hidden away here cocooned in safety, he needed to stop the madman who wanted them back from getting close to them ever again. Trigger couldn’t afford to hold on to hope that they had any more time before Brice started looking for them close to home or worse, went to the press and spun some story that ruined Ashley’s life even more. He couldn’t risk that bastard getting his hands on Adam. Trigger still didn’t know if the boy had family looking for him or were unaware the boy was seemingly on his own with only Ashley and him as protector and caregiver.
He needed to call in the troops, but he didn’t like it. Could he trust anyone? He assumed everyone was under Brice’s thumb.
If he was honest, he didn’t want the sheriff’s department and possibly the FBI swooping in, taking over, and taking Ashley and Adam away from him. He didn’t know how they managed it, but in a short time, he’d gotten used to them being here with him. The house didn’t seem so big and empty anymore. A beautiful woman in his bed made him think of things he shouldn’t. It got harder and harder to see Ashley as just a woman who needed help and not a woman he wanted.
After all she’d been through, she wasn’t someone who needed or wanted something casual. If she wanted him at all. The way she looked at him sometimes . . . He shut that line of thinking down and ordered himself to get to work.
Trigger picked up his cell and dialed the number Sadie gave him.
“Who is this?” Deputy Foster demanded to know.
“You first,” Trigger answered, wanting to be sure he got the right guy. Plus, he didn’t much want to say who he was to the wrong person.
“This is a private number. I don’t know you, or how you got this number, but—”
“Sadie Kendrick,” Trigger interrupted.
“Then she gave you my number for a reason.”
Trigger gave him a hint. “I’m the guy she saved during the drug bust that took down her brother Connor.”
Silence. Then, “What do you want?”
Trigger had been arrested along with Connor during the takedown to make it look like he was one of the other drug traffickers. Appearances had to be maintained even if Connor’s friends and the guys he took down thought he was really working undercover. The game had to be played. These days, Trigger hated the game, but he was damn good at playing it.
“I need to know if you’re a guy who can be trusted.”
“Sadie trusted me enough to give you my number even though I arrested her brother more than once and threatened to put her ass in jail along with him if she helped him again. Other than that, I can only give you my word that if you ask me to keep a lid on something I will, so long as it’s this side of legal.”
“Will you ride the line if it will keep someone safe and alive?”
“I will venture into the shadows, but if things get too shady I’ll fall back on the book and play things straight.”
Exactly what Trigger needed. An ally working the case. “Fair enough. Here’s the deal. I’m not a drug dealer. I’m undercover DEA. Special Agent Beck Cooke. I need you to open a Jane Doe kidnap report. The woman has been held against her will for nearly a year. She’s been repeatedly starved and tortured. I found her and a child who doesn’t belong to her or the kidnapper. I want the boy kept quiet for now. I need to figure out who he is and how he’s connected to the kidnapper. If he is at all.”
“Where are they now?”
“Safe.”
Deputy Foster would probably guess he had them at his place, but Trigger didn’t want to say outright. Deputy Foster could read between the lines that Trigger wanted to keep some information confidential for now. Like not giving him Ashley’s name.
“Does Jane Doe need medical attention?”
“Yes, but that can wait until the storm passes. I’ve got her and the boy squared away. I’ve got pictures of her and the boy’s injuries.” Trigger hated it, but he’d snapped a few photos of Adam while he slept. He didn’t want to put the kid through the ordeal the way he’d done with Ashley. The less intrusive and probing he could be with Adam, the better for the kid to move forward and forget any of this ever happened. Ashley didn’t have the luxury of being a four-year-old with a mind that would fade these memories until he either didn’t remember at all, or the things he did remember felt like they’d happened to someone else.
“She will need X-rays to show her current and past cracked and broken bones for evidence. Later, we’ll order her past medical records for comparison and corroboration that the injuries were sustained during her ca
ptivity.” That word left a bitter taste in his mouth. He tried not to let the images of her condition now turn into a dark story in his mind that spun out of control with one scenario after another of what she’d been through.
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse.” Broken bones healed. Mentally, Ashley would never be the same again. Even now, she slept, but her body shook with whatever nightmare plagued her. She mumbled and whimpered. Her pain and anguish twisted his gut. He wanted to pick her up off the damn floor, hold her in his arms, and find a way to make it all go away. He understood those dark dreams’ effect on the mind, the way they lingered even when you woke, the way they tormented when you let your guard down and couldn’t hold them off in sleep. The way they sapped your energy and will to do anything, like if you sat still long enough everything would finally stop. But it doesn’t. Your mind won’t rest and your body twists into a mass of tension that coils tighter, suffocating you.
“I’ll need to talk to her, get all the facts so we can make an arrest.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Not simple as in high-profile suspect or victim?”
“Both.”
“That explains Jane Doe, but we need to get this guy in custody before he hurts someone else or finds her and the child or skips on us.”
“The storm is helping me with that. Now I need to set things up so we play this smart and things fall in her corner and not his.”
“We can put her in protective custody.”
“I want to avoid taking a woman from one prison to another. Right now, she’s coping. I’m not sure how she’ll deal once word gets out and the investigation heats up.”
“What the hell do you want me to investigate?”
Trigger understood the deputy’s frustration. He’d asked for help and tied Deputy Foster’s hands at the same time.
“Open the case. Send me the case file. I’ll fill it out and take her statement. We’ll get it on record before this guy comes forward with his own version of events. And he will. I’ll send back the report, then we’ll move forward with you arresting him. This guy has the goods on some high-up people in power.” Beck didn’t think Brice targeted a sergeant in the sheriff’s department. “Someone like that tries to shut you down I want to know about it.”
“Shit. Okay. Give me your email.”
Trigger rattled off the information.
Ashley screamed and startled herself awake. She sat bolt upright and stared right at him. The second her eyes locked with his, she relaxed and took a painful breath. He didn’t want to read too much into her immediate relief at seeing him, but damn, the connection he tried to ignore flared in his chest. He gave her a nod to let her know everything was all right. He wanted to do a hell of a lot more than give her a look. His need to touch and comfort her nearly made him stand and go over to her. Instead, Adam jumped off the couch and went to her, sitting in her lap and hugging her close. Ashley held the little boy, though it probably cost her to have his weight on her bruised legs and leaning into her battered body.
“What the hell was that?” Deputy Foster asked, overhearing Ashley’s scream.
“Nothing.” His deadpan response made it clear he had no intention of explaining. “I’ve got to go. Send the report. I’ll get back to you, and we’ll figure out the best way to move forward. And I mean it, keep this quiet.” The longer he kept the secret, before the powers that be found out, the better.
“Beck.”
He looked up at her beautiful face and still-haunted eyes. He held his finger to his lips to ensure she didn’t say anything else.
“Holy fuck, is that Ashley Swan? I’d know that sultry voice anywhere.”
Beck swore and glared at Ashley. People recognized more than her face. It was like hearing Anthony Hopkins, Liam Neeson, or Morgan Freeman. You just knew that voice.
“One word leaks out, I’ll know who did it, and that person won’t see the light of day again.”
The deadly tone got through to Deputy Foster. “Dial down the threats, man. I’m on your side.”
“I don’t threaten people—I make promises. Now get to work. We need to move fast.”
“On it.”
Trigger hung up and stared at Ashley’s confused eyes.
“Who was that?”
“When I’m on the phone, you stay quiet. Unless you want the world to know you’re alive and staying here.”
“Did you tell someone?”
“No, you did with just my name.”
Her eyes went wide and her hand covered her open mouth. “I have to go.” She took one step back before he snagged her wrist and pulled her to a stop.
“Relax. He won’t tell anyone. Deputy Foster is about to make a preemptive strike by opening a case file on you.”
“With my name. It’ll be out”—she looked at his phone, then back at him—“now.”
“Can you do two things for me?”
“What?” Her voice trembled on that one word.
“Breathe. And trust me.”
She sucked in a steadying breath, her eyes narrowed and filled with concern. “I’m trying.”
“Hungry?” Trigger read more in her soft touch on his arm than he did in her eyes. He released her wrist, not wanting to make her feel trapped. He definitely didn’t want her to think anything else was going on.
But Ashley didn’t let go of him. Instead, her gaze dipped to his arm and the tattoos weaving their way up under his sleeve to his shoulder. “This is really interesting.” Her fingers smoothed over his skin. Electricity shot up his arm, making everything in him still. “The two sides of you.”
Trigger glanced at the intricate tattoo with the sharp-edged green vine and single red rose in bloom with the skull in the center. “How so?”
“Lethal and fighting for life.”
That got his attention. His heart beat faster. “I just thought it was cool.”
She didn’t believe him. “You thought the skull would warn people away. You like to do that.”
“It keeps me, and them, alive.”
“Yet you left one side of the leaves soft.” She traced her finger over the rounded edge of one of the leaves on his forearm.
He tried not to tense at her touch, or feel the warmth spreading up his arm and into every cold, dark corner inside him, or acknowledge the way his heart beat faster with every brush of her skin against his.
“The other side is razor sharp. Another warning that if you get too close you’ll get cut down. But the rose . . .”
Drawn in by that voice and her insight, he reluctantly asked, “What about it?”
“A red rose. A symbol of beauty and love.”
“It blooms with death,” he pointed out.
“You too often see the bad in what appears on the surface as benign. But you spend your life trying to erase the malevolent so beauty and love can bloom. You take death off the streets.” She touched her finger to several of the leaves weaving up his arm. She tapped another wicked leaf. “As each new threat appears, you follow the path and take that one out. No matter how hard you try, that vine of death keeps spreading.” She traced one stem until it came to a sharp end on his bicep. “It spreads until you cut it off.” She held his gaze. “You’ll keep hacking at it, knowing it will continue to grow and the best you can do is slow it down because others feed it and all you want to do is choke it.” She spread her fingers wide over his forearm like the vine wrapped around him and squeezed.
“You see a hell of a lot in a simple tattoo.” She saw too much on him and inside him.
“There’s nothing simple about you. Beck.” She emphasized his name, reminding him of how she’d repeated to herself, I am Ashley. A way to remember who she was at the core.
He had yet to dig deep enough to find Beck under Trigger’s mound of shit.
“I see you, Beck. You can’t hide from me beneath Trigger. He’s a character you play, a defense against the world you infiltrate but don’t belong to. The role has gotten harder to s
hed. You’ve played him so long he’s become comfortable. Maybe it’s easier to stay Trigger than be Beck. He’s the bad guy who did all those things you can’t reconcile. Beck’s the good guy who suffers the consequences. You’ve lost touch with him while you punish yourself for whatever is eating you up inside.”
Unable to go there, he denied, denied, denied. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You know I do, but you don’t want to hear it.” Her hand slid down his arm to his hand. She traced her fingers over the back and gripped it in hers. “You saved me, Beck. I’m just trying to repay you. You took this break, this time to get your head straight again, but how can you do that when every time you look in the mirror you see Trigger.” She tilted her head and stared right at him. “The best way to get into character for me is putting on the costume. The hair. The makeup. The clothes. I fall into the part. I look in the mirror and see the person I’m playing.” She reached out and took some of his long hair between her fingertips. “You needed to play the part, so you transformed yourself into Trigger. Maybe if you transform yourself into Beck again, you’ll remember that he’s who you really are and you’ll feel like him again.”
He raked his fingers through his long hair. He really was tired of it. Sometimes he caught his reflection and wondered who the hell that thug was staring back at him.
“What do I know? I could barely remember my own name when you found me and I’ve made a living, won an Oscar, and saved my life pretending to be someone else.”
She walked away.
Damn the woman for knowing exactly what to say and daring him to look long and hard at his life and decide if he wanted to continue to wallow in self-pity, regret, and recriminations for what he’d done, or remember why he’d done those things and that forgiving himself meant accepting responsibility and choosing to move on with his life.
He didn’t need to decide what Trigger was going to do. He needed to figure out what he was going to do, because Beck was a DEA agent and the man he’d worked damn hard to be, pushing himself through school with top grades, applying to the DEA, making it through the rigorous training and qualifiers to become one of the best. He worked undercover because his superiors trusted him to do the job with integrity. He never meant for anyone to get hurt. He’d have given his life to save Paula.
Montana Heat: Escape to You Page 11