A Cry in the Dark

by Jenna Mills

  “Six.”

  Earlier, Liam had wondered what it would be like to hear a soft cry tear from Danielle’s throat, but the broken sound that echoed through the quiet room was not what he’d wanted. He looked from the mess to the woman, saw her biting down on her lip as she stared into her son’s room.

  “Danielle,” he started to say, but she spoke before he could finish.

  “He was going to clean it last night,” she whispered. “There’s a carnival down by the lake. I promised if he cleaned his room, we could go this weekend.”

  The words, soft, drenched with love and fear, had Liam drawing her closer. “You’ll take him to the carnival,” he promised lamely, fighting the urge to pull her into his arms. The senselessness of the situation ripped at him. Titan moved in circles as far removed from this woman as her small house was from the streets of Europe where he thrived. That he would target her and her son, now, here, like this, just didn’t fit.

  “You’ll see,” he said, anyway. Because she would. He would figure it out. He would get this woman’s son back, and Titan would be punished for a rap sheet of crimes that extended from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Drugs, at least in the conventional sense, were just the beginning.

  Before she could protest or deny or torture herself further, Liam led her from her son’s room to the final door. “Yours?”

  “I didn’t make my bed, either,” she said as he stepped into the utterly feminine sanctuary that smelled of roses and baby powder.

  In Alex’s room the messy sheets had screamed little boy. But in Danielle’s room the tangle of soft blue covers and the abandoned black chemise tossed carelessly at the foot of the bed evoked an entirely different image. He didn’t see a little boy tossing and turning, but a woman with untamed dark hair and equally untamed eyes, soft and naked, arching and accepting, demanding more.

  “No harm in that,” he muttered, then almost choked on the words. There was a hell of a lot of harm in the images clouding his mind. “Let me just look around—”

  “The answering machine.” She pushed past him and ran to the table beside her bed, where from the phone a small red light blinked.

  Adrenaline surged past the wall of calm. “Let me—”

  But she was already pushing a series of numbers, standing woodenly with the receiver at her ear. He wanted to take it from her, but he saw the bloodless grip of her fingers and compromised by putting his hand to hers and leaning close, so they could both hear.

  “You were warned.”

  That was all there was. A distorted, mechanical voice, impossible to discern male from female. Then a dial tone.

  You were warned.

  And suddenly it all made a horrible kind of sense. Danielle’s suspicion of him, the way she’d violently rejected him even after he’d convinced her he really was FBI stark fear lurking in her eyes. The way she’d lashed out at him, demanded that he leave her alone, when clearly she needed help.

  Needed him.

  Why she’d never called the authorities to report her son missing and activate the sophisticated Amber Alert system designed to saturate the media with pertinent information.

  “Danielle.” He said her name softly, took the receiver from her icy hands and dropped it to the floor, then turned her to look at him. He tried like hell to breathe. “Tell me.”

  Her eyes were huge, dark. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  The words, barely more than a cracked whisper, confirmed Liam’s darkest suspicions.

  “Damn it,” he growled, biting back an inventive stream of curse words that wouldn’t do either of them any good. But Christ, he hated seeing her like this, as robotic and mechanical as the voice on the phone. That wasn’t Danielle Caldwell. She was a woman of courage and bravado, of fire. Not one of defeat.

  “They threatened you, didn’t they?” The thought sickened him. So did the piercing realization that he’d prevented her from carrying out their demands. “They told you not to involve the authorities or something horrible would happen to your son.”

  “I told you to leave me alone,” she whispered, but her voice broke anyway. “I begged.”

  The word, the way she spit it at him, landed hard and low in his gut. He didn’t want to hear Danielle Caldwell beg, not ever, ever again. Except—

  He shoved aside the inappropriate thought, appalled by the image that automatically formed.

  “If anything happens to him…” She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them a heartbeat later, but the horror remained. “If anything happens to him, his blood will be on your hands. Is that really what you want?”

  Liam was a strong man. Physically. Emotionally. From the time he’d been a small boy, absorbing his father’s alcohol-smothered, hate-filled words, the lash of his two-holed belt, he’d taught himself not to react. In Quantico he’d been trained to withstand stress, trauma, torture. He’d stood with a gun pointed at his head without so much as blinking. He’d crawled into the dirty underbelly of organized crime and pretended to be someone he wasn’t, day after day after dirty slimy day. He’d buried his wife—and come as close to breaking as he would ever allow.

  But standing there in Danielle’s erotically cluttered feminine bedroom, with the soft light of morning pouring around them and those huge, lost, emerald eyes staring at him in accusation, it took all of his will not to stagger back from her, run into the bathroom, lean over the toilet and throw up.

  His blood will be on your hands.

  Liam didn’t need more blood on his hands. Especially that belonging to a little boy.

  “That’s not going to happen,” he said as levelly as he could. He still held her shoulders in his hands, and he wanted to shake her gently, make her believe him, but he’d never used force with a woman, not even a playful shove against noxious cousin who, as a nine-year-old, had thrived on trying to discover what it took to make her cousin lose control.

  “They’re not going to hurt him,” he told her, ignoring the annoying drone of the phone, left too long off the hook. “He was taken for a reason. You have to remember that. Hurting him won’t get them what they want.”

  Please, God.

  Emotion, as unexpected as it was jarring, boiled through him. “You have to trust me,” he went on, because she said nothing, just stared up at him as if he’d ripped her heart out. “I’m not going to let anything happen to your son.”

  Finally she moved. Finally life registered in her eyes, her face. She shook her head, sending hair falling around her face. “Why?” Her voice was stronger now. “Why won’t you just go away? Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  “Because I can’t.” The truth spilled from him like the acid burning his stomach. “Because I know who has your son. I know how he thinks, how he operates.” How he destroyed, how he killed. “And so help me God, I’m not going to rest until I make sure that bastard never hurts another.”

  Danielle’s eyes widened. “Who is it?”

  “Who doesn’t matter—”

  She shoved against him with surprising force considering she looked on the verge of dropping. “The hell it doesn’t,” she snarled, twisting against his grip. “He’s my son, damn it. My son. Not yours.” She broke from him and staggered back, stood with her hands balled into tight fists as she glared up at him. “I have every right to know who’s responsible.”

  Time stood still. He looked at her standing there in the pale morning light, the dark circles ringing her eyes, the mutinous line to her mouth, and wished like hell he could turn back time. That he’d gotten to her sooner. That he’d warned her. That they’d never stood on that beach last night, waiting for a rendezvous that had never come.

  That they weren’t standing here now, in this rose-scented feminine sanctuary, next to a bed whose tangled sheets made him remember a side of life he’d trained himself to forget—hot nights and long rainy mornings.

  He wanted to argue with her. He wanted to deny her claim. He wanted to tell her to just let him do his job. But he couldn’t. Not wh
en she was right.

  Nor could he stand seeing her like this, all patched together on the outside, but empty and broken on the inside.

  “Okay,” he said, and the word tasted bitter on the way out. “You’re right. You deserve answers.”

  A flicker of surprise flitted through her gaze like a black butterfly against a creamy flower, there one moment, gone the next. Never giving an inch, she lifted her chin and wrapped her arms around her middle and waited. “I’m listening.”

  Her clothes were still damp, her shirt molded to her breasts. “And I’ll talk,” he said, stepping toward her. He expected her to pull back, but she didn’t, not even when he reached for her. “But only after you shower and get into some dry clothes

  That would give him a few minutes to regroup.

  “I don’t want a shower.”

  “But you need one,” he said, steering her toward the small bathroom attached to the bedroom. Clutter greeted him there, as well, a scatter of feminine toiletries across the counter, hair brushes and barrettes, jars and bottles of lotion and powder and other concoctions.

  He’d forgotten how enticing a woman’s bathroom could be.

  “You’re exhausted,” he said, leaning over to turn on the hot water, “and still damp from the rain.” He tested the water, added the right amount of cold. A bright yellow scrunchie thing dangled above the faucet. On the side of the tub, another collection of bottles decorated the rim.

  “You’ll feel better after you’re warm and dry.” He looked at her then, reminded himself this was where he had to stop. He could lead a woman to water… “Do I have to take off your clothes, too?” he asked gruffly.

  Her eyes flared, but she didn’t step back from him. “Is that part of your job description?”

  He had no job description. At least not one to which he adhered one hundred percent of the time. “Whatever it takes, honey. Whatever it takes.”

  Chapter 5

  A soft little sound broke from her throat, dangerously close to the one he’d let himself imagine earlier. “How dedicated,” she said, stepping back from him. “But I think I can take it from here.”

  He knew she could. He just wished—

  He wished a lot of things. None of them mattered. “When you’re done, I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  Or at least everything he could.

  Her hair fell in a tangle around her face, drawing his attention to her mouth, a pair of full lips made for laughing and kissing, not frowning and crying. “You’re not going to leave me alone, are you?”

  Very little emotion stained the question. Not accusation, sure as hell not gratitude. “Nope,” he said, with one last glance at the running water. “We can work together or against each other. That choice is yours.” He hesitated, met her eyes. “But no, I’m not walking away.”

  He couldn’t. Not yet. Not anymore.

  Confusion clouded her gaze. “I don’t understand.”

  And for once Liam saw no point in evading, pretending.

  “Neither do I,” he muttered, then before he could do something stupid, something he hadn’t wanted to do in more than three long years, he turned and did exactly what he’d promised he wouldn’t do.

  He walked away.

  %">

  The smell of coffee seduced her long before she stepped from the shower. She’d tried to give up caffeine, once, about four years before, after reading an article about its adverse effects. She’d managed nine days without coffee. She’d even gotten through the withdrawal headaches. But then she’d walked into the kitchen one morning, seen her brother and sister and Ty and Jeremy all seated around the table with the newspaper spread before them and coffee steaming between them, and she’d caved.

  That first sip, after nine days without, had been like a jolt of pure heaven.

  One vice, she’d decided. She could allow herself one vice.

  The rich smell of a Kona blend mingled with the steam swirling through the shower, enticing her to breathe deeply. It galled her to admit it, but the FBI man was right. And that was how she wanted to think of him. As the FBI man. His name, Liam, made him too real. More of a man than an authority.

  She didn’t want to think of him as a man.

  Danielle squeezed liquid soap onto the scrubbie and ran it along her body, trying not to remember the way he’d looked standing in her room, by her bed, so big and tall and disheveled from a night spent in his car. If she let herself, she could still see him standing in the rain—

  She refused to let herself.

  But the ripple of vulnerability still ran through her, an uncertainty she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Because of the circumstances that brought them together, she reasoned. But then, he’d shattered the line between impersonal and personal by leading her into her bathroom. She realized the truth: she wasn’t used to having a man in her house.

  Once, men had been an everyday part of her life. First Anthony, the brother with whom she’d shared every day until two years ago. Then there’d been Jeremy, the kind-hearted man who’d taken in three street orphans and given them a home. Then Ty. For a while they’d all lived together under one roof.

  Then Ty died, and everything had changed.

  Since then there had been no one. Not romantically, not even a salesman or the father of one of Alex’s friends. There’d been no man in her home. Until now. Until Liam.

  Frowning, she scrubbed harder. The FBI man, she corrected. The grim-faced federal agent who’d barged in uninvited and unwanted, violating the instructions she’d been determined to follow.

  Hurting him won’t get them what they want.

  The water was hot, but a chill snaked through her. Alex. Her son. Her precious little boy.

  “I promise, Ty,” she’d said, kneeling in the rain and leaning over his broken body while Anthony had tried to drag her away, scared the remains of the car would explode. Water had streamed down her face, clouded her vision.

  Or maybe those had been tears.

  “I promise I’ll take good care of him. I won’t let anything happen to our son.”

  He’d gazed up at her through vacant eyes, given her a weak squeeze of his hand. “I…I…love y

  And then he’d left her. His eyes had slid shut and his body had gone limp, and she’d been left hovering over him in the rain, holding his still-warm hand and begging him to come back to her, just like that hot summer night a lifetime before when she and Liz had hovered over their mother’s lifeless body, begging her to come back.

  Now Alex, too, was gone.

  Fighting tears she’d grown to despise, Danielle slammed off the water and yanked open the curtain, stepped from the shower and reached for a towel. This time would be different. This time she would do more than beg. She would do whatever she had to do to get her son back.

  Even if that meant calling a truce with a federal agent.

  Resolve hammered through her. She glanced at the lotion and powder on the counter, wasn’t about to waste one second on pampering. She allowed herself only a comb through her hair, hacking through the tangles then combing the thick mass back. No makeup. No time.

  Her robe, the soft gold chenille Jeremy had given her one Christmas so long ago, the one she always, always slipped into after showering, threadbare now at the elbows, hung on the back of the door, but she knew better than to face Liam—the federal agent, she corrected—with bare breasts and bare legs.

  Do I have to take off your clothes, too?

  The darkly erotic words followed her to the small closet in her bedroom, where she pulled on a pair of gray yoga pants and a soft shirt.

  No way would he have carried out the threat she’d seen glowing in the darkness of his eyes.

  Danielle left her bedroom and hurried down the hall, allowing only a brief glimpse into Alex’s room.

  The aroma of coffee grew stronger as she neared the kitchen, joined by a mix of other scents and sounds. She turned the corner ready to demand that Mr. FBI lay it all on the line, but all
the words she’d arranged so carefully in her mind jumbled into a nonsensical mess on the floor.

  Liam stood at the old, icky avocado stove she’d never found the money to replace, with his shirtsleeves rolled up, a dish towel over his arm and a spatula in his hand. Sunlight splashed in through the striped curtains she’d made last spring, landing on his hair and revealing reddish gold highlights she hadn’t noticed before. Natural, she knew in an instant. A man—no, an FBI agent—like the brooding, no-nonsense Liam Brooks would never consent to having his hair professionally highlighted.

  In the old iron skillet eggs crackled and sizzled. Bacon waited on a folded paper towel beside the stove. In the toaster, two slices of bread stood ready.

  The sight was jarring.

  A man in her kitchen. It was another of those peculiarly comforting intimacies she’d walked away from all those years before.

  “Hungry?” He turned toward her even though she’d not made a sound, moved a muscle. That kind of incredible timing had always been her game, walking into a room just as Jeremy hollered her name. Picking up a phone and greeting a friend by name, long before the invention of caller ID.

  “No,” she said, shaking her heading for one of two mugs sitting by the coffeepot. They were all that remained from a set of six she and Alex had made in a pottery class last fall. Her son was skilled with a soccer ball, but his little fingers were clumsy. “Coffee is all I need.”

  “Wrong.” He slid the spatula under one of the fried eggs and eased it onto a plate. “When was the last time you ate?”

  She reached for the coffeepot and poured the steaming liquid into her mug. “Yesterday,” she hedged, not about to admit it had been yesterday at lunch, close to twenty-four hours before.

  “You need your strength,” he said casually, comfortably, as though they shared a kitchen and breakfast every morning.

  Danielle ignored the unwanted niggle of familiarity and brought the mug to her mouth, sipped deeply of the strong coffee. “What I need are answers.”

  He strolled past her and set a plate on the table. “It’s a package deal,” he said. “If you want answers, you have to eat.”