by Lisa Childs
“I’ll call Steve and let him know he’s picking up Mark, too. We’ll be happy to watch him until you come to pick him up,” Tammy generously offered as she pulled shut the door to the classroom, leaving Caroline alone with Thad. If she’d been hoping to play matchmaker again, she was going to be disappointed.
But not nearly as disappointed as Caroline was sure she was going to be. She dropped into the chair behind her desk. “Why are you here?” she asked. “Has something happened…something else?”
“You heard about the break-in,” he surmised.
“You should have called me.” Heat rushed to her face. “For Mark’s sake,” she hastened to explain. “If he’s in danger…”
IF THEIR SON WAS IN DANGER, it was because of Thad, so the best way to keep him and Caroline safe was to keep his distance from them.
“This was a bad idea,” Thad said, forcing out the words. He couldn’t look at her, so he gazed around her classroom instead. The walls served as sunshine-yellow backdrops for the kids’ colorful artwork and starred papers.
“What was?” she asked, as if bracing herself for the worst.
“My trying to be a father.” He swallowed hard, choking on the lies. “You were right that I’m not cut out for it.”
She sucked in a breath of surprise, but she didn’t argue with him. He had hoped she would argue, that she would tell him he was better at being a dad than he had thought he could be.
He had been so worried that he would have already done or said something to screw up his relationship with Mark and make the little boy hate him. But he was pretty sure his son loved him as much as Thad loved Mark. And it was because Thad loved him so much that he had to back away.
But if he told Caroline the truth, she might argue with him. She might think, as his brother had and she had earlier, that he was just overreacting and being paranoid. She might convince him to stay in his son’s life instead of his convincing her that it was best he stay away from Mark.
The sad thing was that she seemed to need no convincing. Caroline said nothing, just stared up at him with dry eyes. It was as if she’d cried herself out over him four years ago and didn’t intend to waste any more tears on him.
He didn’t blame her. “I should have just stayed away from him and you,” he said. “I’ll be leaving soon anyways.”
“You will?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
He jerked his head in a sharp nod.
“You found your parents’ killer?”
“Not yet,” he admitted. “But we’re pretty sure we’re closing in on him now.”
Yesterday he had only glanced over the names his aunt had written down, thinking that he wouldn’t have recognized any of them since he’d just been a kid when his parents died. But when he’d studied the list more closely, one name had jumped out at him.
Ed Turner.
When he’d questioned Aunt Angela about him, she’d been unable to say for certain that his mother had had an affair with the man. But she’d admitted that the two had always looked at each other a certain way, as if they’d seen more of each other. A lot more of each other.
“So you know who their killer is?”
He sighed. “We don’t have any proof yet.” Of the affair or anything else. Hell, they hadn’t even been able to find Turner yet. Devin had been trying to track down the man for months in order to extend an offer for his company.
And it was the man’s disappearance that worried Thad. A lot of what he’d learned about Ed Turner worried him, and had made him Thad’s prime suspect even though his brothers weren’t as convinced of the man’s guilt.
“Are the police looking at him as a suspect, too?” she asked.
A respected businessman whose company held several defense contracts for communications equipment? He would be their last suspect. But Thad’s gut told him otherwise.
“We’ll find the evidence with or without the police department’s help.” He would get Turner’s DNA himself, court order or subpoena be damned. He just had to find Turner, in order to keep everyone Thad cared about safe.
“So as soon as whoever this guy is has been arrested, you’ll be leaving?”
He nodded. “You’ve known that all along.”
She surprised him with a laugh. “Wow. Here’s déjà vu for you.”
“We have had this conversation before.” And it was almost as hard this time as it had been last time. But this time he was leaving for her sake and Mark’s. To protect them.
She sighed. “And I knew we’d be having it again.”
“That’s why you didn’t want me getting close to you,” he said. “You were right about that. I shouldn’t have tried to get close to Mark, either. Hopefully he’s not too attached to me that he’ll miss me when I’m gone.”
“You haven’t been around that long,” she said, as if implying that Mark would forget about him.
Pain clutched Thad’s heart. Would his son forget all about him? At three, he was young enough to do that. But Thad wasn’t going to stay away forever, just until the threat against his son was gone.
But given the way Thad lived, would the threat against him ever really be gone?
“This is for the best,” he said, trying to convince himself. “I’m not father material. You and Mark will be better off.”
“With you halfway across the world? With you putting your life in danger?”
“It’s what I do.”
She nodded, and her eyes shimmered with tears. “We will be better off if you leave now,” she agreed. “Because you’re going to leave eventually anyways. For good, when you get killed because you put yourself in the middle of someone else’s war.”
Someone else’s war.
Was that what he’d been fighting, someone else’s war, when he should have been fighting his own here at home? Of course no one had known then that the wrong man had been convicted of his parents’ murders.
“What I do is important,” he defended himself.
She nodded. “And if you didn’t do it, someone else would. It doesn’t have to be you. But you’d rather go off alone to those countries and let someone else raise your son.”
She hadn’t married in the past four years, but Thad wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that was because she’d been in love with him. She’d just been totally focused on raising their son. But when Mark got older, she would find someone. That nine-to-five guy she deserved.
Pain clutched his heart. “Caroline…”
She shook her head. “It’s fine. I didn’t expect anything from you. Unfortunately, Mark did. But I’ll tell him…” She sucked in a shaky breath. “You don’t have to see him again.” She stood, as if prepared to show him out the door. “And I don’t have to see you again, either.”
He turned for the door, walking slowly in case she changed her mind and tried to stop him. But he would never know if she would have because her cell phone rang. He opened the door, ready to leave her just as he had planned.
But she cried out, “No!”
His heart leaped against his ribs, and he whirled back around to her. “What’s happened?”
Her face had paled, and she trembled uncontrollably, the cell phone dropping from her hand onto her desk. “A man with a gun stormed the day care.”
Oh, God. God, no…
He fought down the fear. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Tammy’s husband,” she whispered. “Steve tried to stop the man, and he was shot.”
“And Mark?” What had happened to their sweet little boy?
Her eyes widened with horror and filled with tears. “The man took him.”
BLOOD SPATTERED THE little boy’s face, and red streaks trailed down his cheeks with tears. His hand shaking slightly, Ed wiped a damp washcloth across the kid’s skin and washed away the blood.
It wasn’t the boy’s blood. He hadn’t been hurt. Yet.
“It’s not real?” the kid asked, his bottom lip trembling.
“It’s fake,” Ed l
ied. “That man wasn’t really hurt. We were just playing a game. Like cops and robbers, you know.”
The little boy’s breath shuddered out in a ragged sigh of relief. “Mommy doesn’t let me play cops and robbins. She says it’s too vi’lin.” He shivered. “And it was a really scary game.”
“Sometimes adults play scary games,” Ed said. And then, inevitably, someone got hurt. Too bad that this time it would be this little boy.
“So you know Bethany’s daddy?”
Even though he had only recognized Steve Stehouwer because he was the anchor on the local news, Ed nodded. The man shouldn’t have tried to play hero, and he wouldn’t have gotten shot. But there were always innocent casualties in war. And when Thad Kendall had killed his son, he had declared war on Ed Turner. Kendall wasn’t the only one who’d spent years dodging bullets and roadside bombs in foreign countries. After he’d left his cushy sales job at Kendall Communications, Turner had launched his own company specializing in defense communications. In order to meet the needs of his clients, he’d walked in their shoes. He’d lived as a spy. That was why he had immediately recognized Thad Kendall for what he really was.
A killer.
Ed led the little boy out of the dated pink-and-lime-green bathroom into the kitchen. He didn’t trust the kid in the living room where he might turn on the TV and learn from the news that Ed had lied about the game. The kid would find out soon enough that this was very real.
“Are you related to my daddy?” the little boy asked as he settled onto a chair at the old Formica table. His blue eyes wide, he stared at the pictures of his father and him and his mother plastered all over the walls. “Mommy says he has a big family.”
“Yes, he does. And I guess that in a way I am related to him,” Ed said as he took the box of hot chocolate packets out of the cupboard. He could at least make the little kid comfortable while he waited to implement the next phase of his plan. If only he could make himself comfortable with a damn strong drink…. “I’m your aunt Natalie’s father.”
The little boy peered through the doorway into the living room and then turned toward the open door of the bathroom off the hall. “Is Aunt Natalie here?”
“No.” Natalie had never really been his. Her paternity had been denied and covered up so that Marie Kendall wouldn’t lose what she’d valued most. Money. Image. Her looks.
In the end she’d lost them all. Just as her son Thad would. He had been the last of her children by Joseph Kendall, and although he hadn’t joined the business, he was still the most like him.
Ruthless. Determined to keep what he considered his…even when it had really belonged to Ed.
Like Natalie.
And Marie.
But Ed wasn’t as upset over losing them as he was over losing his son. His boy had stood by him through it all and had died trying to protect him. Ed hadn’t deserved his boy’s loyalty. He hadn’t been a good father to Wade.
After Marie had refused to accept Ed’s offer to leave Emily and build a life with her, Ed had quit Kendall. He’d started his own company, intent on making it even bigger than Joseph had. He hadn’t. But he’d built a strong niche company, and in those war-torn countries, he’d learned what was really important.
Emily. She had always been so loving and supportive, uncomplaining when he was never around, never telling him how much their son had suffered. How much she had suffered. He’d intended to make it up to her that night, but then he and his family had run into the Kendalls at a holiday charity function.
He’d seen Natalie and known immediately she was his daughter…and what he’d been denied. He’d only intended to talk to Marie when he’d used his key to let himself into her house later that night. But things had gone so wrong.
Emily had never figured out what had happened. She’d claimed to understand that he had to keep traveling for his job. He had never been able to stop traveling, because he’d worried that even though another man had been convicted, he would eventually be caught. But the only one who’d figured out his guilt was his son, even though it had taken him years to piece it all together. And still Wade had stood by him.
He deserved to have his death avenged. Ed owed him that much since he’d never been there for his son, just as Thad Kendall had never been there for his son.
Ed drew in a deep breath and reached for the block of knives on the kitchen counter. It was just too bad that to avenge Wade, Ed would have to take the life of this sweet kid.
Chapter Twelve
Caroline had thought her heart had hurt during Thad’s callous goodbye speech. But she hadn’t known how much a heart could rip apart until the day care director had called to report Mark missing, taken by an armed gunman.
She couldn’t stop shaking. And it didn’t help that she was here, at the Kendall mansion, where people had been murdered, perhaps by the same man who’d abducted her son and shot her friend.
While Thad had filled in his family on what had happened at the day care center, she had phoned Tammy and had been surprised her friend had even taken her call. But Tammy, being the friend she was, had been as concerned about Mark as she was her own wounded husband. Steve was still in surgery, having a bullet removed from his shoulder. The doctors had assured Tammy that the gunshot wound was not life-threatening. Steve Stehouwer would live.
But she had no such assurances about her son.
Strong arms wrapped around her, pulling her back against a chest in which a heart pounded as madly as hers did.
“We’ll find him,” Thad assured her.
She tugged free of his grasp and whirled on him. “How? You’re not even certain who took him!”
His family, who had all gathered in the family room, grew quiet and watched her, probably afraid she was losing her mind. But what did she care? If she’d truly lost her son, what did losing her mind matter?
Ash, the only one of Thad’s family she had previously met, approached them. The St. Louis PD detective said, “We have a lead on the man who murdered our parents.”
“But why would he take Mark?” she asked. “Why would he come after my son?”
“Money,” Craig Kendall, the man she’d seen at St. Luke’s, remarked. “He may call us with a demand for ransom so that he can get to some country with no extradition.”
He thought like a businessman—logically. She thought like a mother, and so did the woman who approached her. She had to be the aunt Thad had spoken of so lovingly. She folded Caroline into her arms as if she were one of the family.
“We’ll pay whatever he asks,” she promised. “We’ll get our Mark back.”
Our. They’d already claimed her son as a Ken dall. She clutched at the woman’s softness and warmth before pulling back.
Tears streamed down her face, but she couldn’t fight them back any longer. “We don’t know that this is about ransom or revenge,” she pointed out. “We don’t know the whole story because Thad won’t tell us.”
Instead of staring at her as if she’d lost her mind, Thad’s family was staring at him. All of them with the same suspicion and doubt that she’d harbored.
He shook his head. “We don’t have time for this. I have calls to make—”
“To whom?” his oldest brother asked. “That mysterious woman who took her time getting the message to you that the man convicted of killing our parents was innocent? Who is she?”
“Who are you?” Caroline asked.
He shook his head, his phone clasped in his hand as he backed from the room.
His sister stopped him. “You told me who I really am,” she reminded him. “Don’t you think it’s fair that we find out who you really are?”
Thad shook his head and groaned. “I can’t.”
“Our son is missing,” Caroline said. “Maybe his kidnapping has to do with your parents’ killer and maybe it has to do with whatever you’re keeping from us.”
“We can’t help you unless we know everything,” Detective Kendall said. “We might be wasting our time ch
asing down the wrong leads.”
“I’ll find that out after I make a couple of calls,” Thad promised.
“To whom?” Caroline demanded to know. “Who are you calling?”
He closed his eyes, as if praying for divine intervention. Then finally he answered them all, “My superior in the State Department.”
Natalie’s fiancé nodded as if he had confirmation of something he’d already learned. And he wrapped his arms around Natalie, offering her the comfort Caroline had refused to accept from Thad.
She’d only wanted the truth. But now that she knew…her mind reeled from all the possibilities. “You work for the government?” she asked.
Thad nodded.
“And you’ve been doing this for years?”
“I was recruited out of college,” he admitted, holding her gaze while his family reacted with gasps of surprise.
She suspected that was another lie. He hadn’t been recruited; he had sought them out, offering up his life for his country.
Or for excitement.
Or for justice….
“So have you made a lot of enemies over the years?” She had to know.
“Only if my cover was blown,” he said. “And until recently I was certain that it had never been compromised. You all just became some of a very small group of people who know that I’m more than a photojournalist.”
“What happened recently?” Ash asked, ever the detective.
“When I left midassignment to come back here, one of my associates was abducted,” Thad said, his blue eyes darkening with regret and guilt. “Before he was murdered, he was tortured.”
Could that be happening now to their son? Could someone be torturing him?
She gasped in horror, and her legs gave out, folding beneath her.
THAD WAS TOO FAR AWAY to catch Caroline before she hit the floor. She never lost consciousness, though, or her anger and resentment at him. When he reached out to help her up, she shrank back from him, as if unable to bear his touch, and got to her feet herself.