Harlequin Romantic Suspense January 2021

by Marie Ferrarella, Regan Black, Karen Whiddon

  Noah knew what he was about to see, but he drew in a sharp breath anyway. The image had been zoomed in on the bundle. And the bundle was a baby.

  CHAPTER 15

  Noah thought Charger would stop there. That it was the only trick—the only big reveal—he had up his sleeve. The fact that it was Elle in the video meant it didn’t require much thinking to realize that baby had to be Katie. Before Noah could comment on that—or on his belief that the kid was clearly better off with Elle than with the man standing in front of him—Charger spoke up once more.

  “Considering your past,” said the crooked businessman, “I’d think that the kidnapping might be enough.”

  Noah met his eyes in a level stare. For the first time in as long as he could remember—maybe for the first time since his sister went missing—hearing a reference to her kidnapping didn’t dredge up every imaginable emotion. He didn’t feel the furious futility or the mind-bending grief. The sorrow was still there. Maybe knowing Elle, and feeling something positive and new and so very real for her, tempered all that rage and sadness. Or maybe Noah’s disgust at Trey Charger’s manipulation simply overrode it. Either way, he didn’t need to jump into defensive mode.

  “Having Greta taken didn’t affect my ability to see what kind of father you are,” he said instead, repugnance standing out clearly in his voice.

  “Well. That’s a real shame.” Charger’s upturned mouth belied his true feelings on the matter. “I was really hoping to appeal to our common ground.”

  “We have nothing in common.”

  “We have Elle.”

  Now the rage did bubble up, at least a little. Before any of it could escape, though, Charger had already brought something new on the laptop. And despite wanting to look away, the slightest glimpse of the photograph on the screen was enough to grab and hold Noah’s attention. It was a macabre scene. Like something out of a crime show. A woman’s body lay crumpled in a heap on the floor directly in front of a crib. Her outstretched arm brushed the edge of a discarded teddy bear, and her ankle was twisted at an awkward angle. All around her body were numbered yellow markers.

  “What the hell is this?” Noah asked roughly.

  Charger’s reply was a shrug. “My nanny. And the aftermath.”

  Noah stared for another moment before truly clueing in to what the man meant. “Elle didn’t do this.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Let me give you a little more evidence.”

  Quickly, Charger tapped through a series of photos, identifying each one as they came onto the screen.

  Picture one was a dead woman lying under a sheet, eyes closed, shoulders exposed, face scrubbed but bruised and marred.

  “See that mark on the nanny’s forehead?” Charger asked. “That’s the blunt force trauma that killed her.”

  The second photo showed three matching cylindrical metallic vases. A mess of dried flowers sat at their base, and a measuring tape indicated that each one was two inches across.

  “There were four of these,” Charger explained. “All heavy. All at the top of the stairs just outside Kaitlyn’s room. They line up perfectly with the wounds on the nanny’s face.”

  Next came a picture of a broken window with shards of glass strewn along the sill below.

  “That’s in the nursery,” Charger told Noah. “The police believe Elle was trying to make it look like someone broke in, kidnapped the baby and killed the nanny in the process. And before you ask, yes, I admit that I pulled some strings to have my friend on the force run the case and keep it all very, very quiet. But this is the report.”

  An official-looking form, covered in messy handwriting, popped onto the screen. It was easy to pick out key words. Victim. Blunt-force trauma.

  “You can read it in detail if you like,” added Charger. “But I know your bias will tell you not to buy it anyway. So to settle your completely founded worries, let me present the last exhibit in my little case.”

  Finally came the same freeze-frame shot of Elle, staring up at the camera. Only this time, it was zoomed in, and digital circles had been drawn over the picture. The first was on Elle’s face. The second was around a metallic object hanging out of the bag hanging at her side.

  “In case you had any doubts…” said Charger. “The answer is yes. That is the missing vase. That is a smudge of something that looks a hell of a lot like blood on her pretty cheeks.”

  Noah stared. There was a denial in his head. Utter disbelief. It wasn’t possible.

  Isn’t it, though?

  He tried to stuff the question back into the mental box it’d popped out of, but he couldn’t quite do it. What did he really know about Elle? The answer was simple. Nothing. For all their intimacy, she hadn’t told him much. What she had told him could all be a lie. No matter how badly he wanted it to be otherwise. And as much as he didn’t want to, Noah couldn’t help but recall Elle’s response when Dez had suggested she’d killed the last man to try to bring her in. No one has ever tried to bring me in, she’d said. Or something pretty damn close. It’d felt deliberately vague then. Now it felt even more so.

  “I didn’t want to believe it either,” Charger said, his voice laced with false sympathy.

  Noah brought his eyes to the other man’s face. “What I really don’t believe is that you care, one way or the other.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Charger snapped the laptop shut, then set it on the floor. “Either way, you need to look at the facts, Mr. Loblaw, and you need to mull them over. You need to listen to me, too. Carefully, because this is your one shot at living. I’m not telling you I’m an angel. God knows I’m not. Hell. That baby’s mother was barely more than an overpriced hooker. So all I’m saying is that Elle isn’t exactly a peach, either. She’s sneaky and manipulative. She’s a kidnapper and a murderer.” Charger shook his head and let out a dramatic sigh. “But I made her a promise that I’d let you go so long as you stayed gone, and I’m a man of my word, so…” He trailed off, pushed back his suit jacket and freed his weapon—a handgun equipped with a small silencer—and aimed it at Noah. “This’ll hurt a bit. I’d say I’m sorry about that, but it’d be a lie.”

  Noah’s eyes flicked from Charger to the gun and back again. “You’re kidding, right? You’re going to shoot me? How the hell does that help you keep your promise?”

  “It helps because it stops you—at least temporarily—from chasing Elle down and asking for some kind of excuse. In turn, the slowdown will give you a chance to think about the dead nanny’s face. About whether or not there’s any excuse that could cover that.”

  As soon as the other man had finished speaking, he raised the gun again. And this time, he didn’t pause. In fact, he moved so quickly that Noah barely dragged in a breath before a muffled bang sent him into a spiral of pain that radiated from his foot up the rest of his body.

  A moment later, he felt Charger’s hands on him, freeing him from his bonds. Not that it mattered. The burn of the bullet was so fierce that Noah simply slid from the chair. He knew he should get up and do something. Anything, probably. There was even a small, tiny part of his brain that urged him to get up and take a swing at the other man. Except all he could do was breathe. Even when Charger’s fingers came at him again, this time to tuck something into Noah’s partially clenched fist, he wasn’t yet ready to move. And through the blur of the pain, he heard the other man’s voice.

  “That card’ll get you one freebie with a doctor who won’t feel obligated to report that GSW to the cops. And in two minutes, there’ll be a courtesy cab downstairs, ready to take you there. The tab’s on me, of course. All you have to do is get there. He won’t wait long.”

  Then the other man’s feet thumped lightly away, leaving Noah to fight to get to his feet before the taxi left without him.

  * * *

  As tense and emotionally overwrought as she wa
s, Elle found it easier to let herself drift in and out of consciousness. It was simpler than talking to Detective Stanley. Better, too, than thinking about where Noah was, and whether or not he was actually okay. Being half-asleep had the added bonus of not giving her too much time to wrestle with the giddiness at the upcoming reunion with Katie. Because she couldn’t be giddy. She didn’t have that luxury. She had no idea what Trey had in store for the two of them, and she wasn’t sure she even wanted to speculate on it. So she let herself drift. But there was a downside to not letting herself dwell on the details. And that was that her subconscious took hold, and it wasn’t pretty.

  Images and memories and the accompanying emotions flitted along the periphery of Elle’s partially awake mind. Some were vague, wispy demons. Others were far more specific. Like the first time she’d had to take Katie in for a medical appointment. It’d been terrifying. And not just because her sweet, six-month-old baby had been crying for hours, gasping for breath, and choking on her own tears. Not even because Katie’s fever had been so high that Elle could feel the burn of her skin from inches away. What had paralyzed her was the fear of being caught. Of being asked for proof that the still-tiny infant was her own. Of being forced to hand over documents that would allow Trey to track them. She’d rushed out of the hospital the moment the doctors said she could. But then there’d been the terrifying moment in the parking lot. A dark-haired man had stepped out of a sleek sedan, and Elle had been sure—so sure—that it was him. And instead of running, she’d frozen. When the man had finally turned, revealing that he was a complete stranger, Elle had nearly collapsed from relief. And for three weeks following the incident, she’d questioned her ability to keep Katie safe. Finally, she’d enrolled in a Momma-and-Me running group, determined to teach her own body that staying still wasn’t an option. But she’d never quite shaken that “what-if-he-really-finds-us” feeling.

  And now you’ve let it come true.

  The thought—the accusation—jolted Elle awake. Almost blinded by the stab of guilt that hit her gut, she blinked a look out the window, watching the raindrops hit it in a rhythmic way.

  She peered through the wetness, trying to discern their location, but the light was too scarce to allow her to even hazard a guess, and after a few, fruitless moments, the tap-splash, tap-splash against the glass almost lulled her. But the retreat back into the restless, semi-conscious state brought along another, specific recollection. One that was even older, and even darker. That day had shared a lot with the current one. It was also rainy, fraught with fear, and with Katie’s life—and Elle’s own—on the line.

  Elle had just turned twenty, and it’d been two long years since she’d set foot in the place where she grew up. The place she refused to refer to as home. That she’d sworn never to set foot in again, no matter what. But circumstances had changed, and she’d needed to make the trip, just one more time. So she had. Except it wasn’t exactly a smooth, painless return. It took two weeks in a hotel to work up the nerve to even go and look. It’d taken two more to come up with a plan. Another two days to set it in motion. But finally, the moment had come.

  Elle remembered very little about the hours leading up to that night. She did know that she’d barely slept for two days, and that the weather had suited her mood. Wind bashed against the windows. Rain pelted down. And she’d hoped the chaos would work to her advantage.

  But it didn’t really, did it? said the lucid part of her brain.

  She acknowledged the question with a nod. But in actuality, things had started out okay. Aside from the unpredicted rain, the initial plan went off without a hitch. The camera feed had been cut. The nanny had taken the bribe. The guard had consumed the dosed coffee and been forced to take a break at the right moment. And Elle had gotten in. Which was about the same time all hell broke loose.

  Even in her dozing state, her heart rate started to accelerate. Her chest tightened, too, and sweat beaded across her brow and lip.

  In the dreamlike memory, she was just reaching the top of the stairs. Just hearing the unexpected sounds from behind the nursery door and just reaching for the vase atop the little table in the hall. Elle could practically feel the cool metal in her palm. But before she could get to the next part—the part where she came face-to-face with the woman whose life she was responsible for ending—the car jerked to a stop, yanking Elle firmly back into the world of the living.

  Heart thumping with a renewed combination of nerves and hope, her eyes found the car window. She squinted through the dark and the rain, and right away she spied the yellow porch lights ahead. And she realized that she now knew exactly where they were. From the log cabin exterior—a front for the distinctly unrustic interior—to the wraparound porch to the swing hanging from the evergreens in the back, Elle was familiar with it all. They were at Trey’s summer home on Wavers Lake, just a couple of hours away from Vancouver. In fact, the very last time she’d seen the man in question, it had been almost in the very spot where she and the detective were stopped right now. And the memory of it came back, hitting her as hard as any of the ones that had surfaced on the long drive.

  That day, at six o’clock in the evening, she’d stepped onto the porch and stared at the back of the abusive man’s dark head. He’d been watching the sunset, and she’d taken a few steps toward him without even realizing it. Elle had been going to ask him something, but it’d gone out of her head. Because her movement had sparked something. An epiphany of sorts. Because he hadn’t noticed her movement. And he’d left his gun unattended on the arm of one of the Adirondack chairs there on the porch. It meant Trey Charger was human. Fallible. For all the evil he’d planned for her future, he could be stopped.

  Elle’s brain—and her fighting spirit—switched on. She seriously considered grabbing the gun and simply firing. Emptying every one of the chambers. But then she thought of Trey’s police connections, and the fact that no one would buy her story of self-defense, no matter how true it might be. Then she’d done a remarkable thing. She’d left. Turned back into the house. Grabbed a bag and stuffed it with a few necessities. Stolen whatever cash she could find. And just walked away.

  She’d known he would come after her. Relentlessly, probably. But the world was big, and even without a passport, it was easy enough to put space between them. Cash jobs hadn’t been hard to find for a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old woman. And yeah, maybe she’d been on edge sometimes. But overall, Elle had felt far safer away from Trey than she could ever had felt under his roof. But that was two entire years before Katie.

  Katie.

  Thinking of her seemed to conjure the sound of her voice. A wordless whimper that Elle had comforted away after the onset of a nightmare, or after Katie had skinned her knee or had her feelings hurt. And for a second, Elle thought she was imagining the noise. But then Detective Stanley’s voice carried in—along with the sudden whip of wind and a barrage of raindrops—and she realized it was real. Katie was out there in the storm.

  Ignoring everything but the cries, Elle whipped off her seatbelt, launched herself past the detective, then tossed her gaze back and forth, searching. It took only a moment to find her. She was lying limp in the arms of a strange man, and their silhouetted forms sent every protective-parent hackle up. Why was he holding her? Who was he? How dare he put hands on her? And then, as if brought about by the force of her anger, a zap rang out, and the porch lights went black.

  And Elle bolted. She couldn’t help it. Detective Stanley was yelling at her, but she didn’t care. Her feet smacked against the soaked ground, and mud sprayed up while her immediately-sopping ponytail smacked against her face. None of that meant anything either. She dashed all the way up the driveway, her tears mingling with the rain as she finally reached the stoop and gasped out an order at the short, squat man who held Katie in an awkward, cradle-like position. As though he’d never had a child in his arms ever before. And it made Elle’s stomach roll.

 
; “Give her to me,” she said, stretching out her still-cuffed arms. “Now.”

  Katie stirred immediately, and her blue eyes opened—sleepily at first, then widening as she caught sight of Elle. “Momma?”

  “Come here, baby,” Elle replied, holding out her cuffed hands.

  The unknown man stepped back, his overly full mouth twisting into a grimace. His movements made Katie wriggle to get free, and when he didn’t let go, Elle had to fight an urge to stomp on his foot. She forced herself to take as calming a breath as she could manage. But she couldn’t stop her words from coming out in a bitten-off form.

  “Give. Her. To. Me. Now.”

  The squish of boots in mud told her that Detective Stanley had come up behind her, and Elle swung toward him, her anger and frustration ready to be unleashed. But he spoke first, directing his words toward the other man.

  “Let her have the kid,” the detective said, his voice utterly dismissive as he reached out and undid Elle’s handcuffs. “Trey won’t be back for an hour or more anyway. Might as well give them what little time they have.”

  Elle wasn’t sure if she was more grateful for the gesture, or more scared of what the second part of his statement implied. But she decided there wasn’t much point in dwelling on the latter. Not while she was at last taking Katie back into her arms, the little girl’s arms clinging to her own like she was never going to let go. So Elle chose to embrace the gratitude, and she pressed her chin to the top of Katie’s head, then let the two men guide her into the house.

  CHAPTER 16

  If Noah had been thinking about it at all, he wouldn’t have accepted the cab ride. He sure as hell wouldn’t have gone to some off-the-record doctor who’d been recommended by Trey Charger. Of course, it was pretty damn hard to be rational for the first ten minutes after being shot. So by the time he was clear-headed enough to really consider not accepting the assistance, Noah had already stumbled his way out of the apartment. He’d already pulled himself in the back seat of the taxi and laid himself across the bench as the tires rolled underneath his body. He’d even already let himself be yanked into an oversized house by a small myopic man—who’d opened the door, taken a nervous look around, then grabbed hold of Noah’s elbow, pulled hard and slammed the door behind him.