Or would he think that she’d just taken off on her own? That she’d duped him yet again?
She glanced back toward the street, wanting to wait for him. Wanting him to come for her. But she had no way of knowing if he was coming—if he were even able or willing to come after her.
And she couldn’t wait any longer. This was her last shot to find out who had abducted her—to find out the identity of the father of her baby.
*
“WE’RE TOO LATE,” Aaron said as he pulled into the employee lot and parked beside the Camaro, which was in a space farthest from the building. Even once he’d gotten Whit’s rental car started, he should have known it would never catch up to the faster vehicle Charlotte had taken. “She’s probably already inside.”
She must have taken the extra two badges from him when she’d hugged him. God, he’d been a fool again—to think that she’d actually been apologizing to him for all the secrets she’d kept from him.
But she’d only been playing him to get what she wanted. Access to Serenity House. After what she’d gone through—being tied down and beaten—why would she want to go back inside?
And would he be able to get her out again?
He shut off the vehicle and turned toward the three-story brick building. Lights shone in only a few windows, the rest of the rooms eerily dark.
Serenity House had been anything but serene earlier that evening—it had been like a war zone with gunfire and fighting and yelling. Hell, there had even been the vehicle knocking down the fence. But as they’d passed the front entrance, he’d seen that gate and fence had been repaired, so it appeared as though nothing had happened. And now it seemed that hardly anyone was around—guards, staff or patients.
Whit stared at the black Camaro as if trying to determine if it was the one that had raced past them earlier. “I have to admit that I’m surprised she came here at all. I figured she’d just keep driving.”
“She wants to find Princess Gabriella every bit as much as you do,” Aaron said. That had to be the reason she would risk going back inside. Now he understood why she’d been so protective of the princess. She hadn’t been just doing her job. She’d been guarding her sister.
Whit shook his head. “I doubt that…”
“She said she doesn’t want to take Princess Gabriella’s place.”
“She’s said a lot of things.”
“Actually she hasn’t,” Aaron said, compelled to defend her. “It wasn’t that she lied to me. She just didn’t tell me things.”
“A lie of omission is still a lie,” Whit persisted.
“I guess you’d know.”
Sick of arguing with his old partner, Aaron stepped out of the car and slammed the door. “We have to find her.”
Despite her skills, Charlotte needed him. She wouldn’t be able to get in and out of Serenity House alone. Remembering the shots that had been fired at him earlier in this lot, Aaron moved cautiously toward the building.
Whit’s footsteps followed him, the other man sticking close and keeping his voice low. “She’s already beaten us to whatever we might find here.”
“You don’t know that.” She could have been stopped at the gate. Maybe the ID badges they’d taken had been deactivated. Maybe they wouldn’t open the locked gates and doors.
Disappointment and frustration made Whit’s whisper gruff. “Princess Gabriella isn’t here.”
Aaron had already checked that out; he knew it was true. Obviously Whit had learned the same from Stanley Jessup’s young reporter’s source. “But maybe whoever put Charlotte here took Princess Gabriella, as well.”
“I doubt both of them survived what happened in Paris,” Whit replied.
“We don’t know what happened in Paris.”
“She does…”
Aaron was done arguing. He ignored the other man and hurried toward the gate.
“Stop,” Whit ordered in a harsh whisper.
Recognizing the urgency in Whit’s voice, Aaron froze and crouched lower to the pavement, wary of getting shot at again. He turned back to Whit, who was pointing toward one of the few other cars parked in the lot.
Like the fog rising up from the ground, steam covered the windows, but it didn’t conceal the dark shadows of two people sitting inside the front seat.
Had Charlotte already been grabbed—before she’d even made it to the building?
With just a look and a jerk of his head, Aaron communicated with his old partner. They each took a side of the car—Whit on the driver’s side and Aaron the passenger’s. That was probably where Charlotte would be sitting if she were inside the vehicle.
He could only see the shadows through the fogged-up windows. He couldn’t tell if the passenger was actually Charlotte. And he had no clue who the driver was. The U.S. Marshal? One of the guards?
Neither shadow moved. They must not have noticed him pass behind the vehicle on his way across the lot. Why were they just sitting there—long enough to steam up the windows?
Were they talking? Arguing?
He heard neither, nothing except for the mad pounding of his own pulse in his ears. Foreboding chilled him more than the cool gusts of wind. Something wasn’t right. It had to be Charlotte…
Whit moved as silently and quickly as Aaron did. Each had his weapon clenched in his hand, the barrel glittering in the first light of dawn streaking across the sky.
Maybe he could grab her and pull her to safety before the driver even realized they were sneaking up on them. With his free hand, Aaron grabbed the handle and jerked open the door. And the passenger fell out—onto him. Blood—thick and sticky—dripped from the woman’s body—saturating his shirt. And he realized it wasn’t steam fogging up the windows but a spray of blood.
They were too late.
Chapter Ten
“This is why you don’t want to help me,” a soft voice murmured from the cover of the enveloping fog.
Startled, Aaron jerked—knocking the body off him so that it dropped onto the asphalt and rolled over. With the hole in her face from the bullet she’d taken in the back of her head, the woman was nearly unrecognizable but for the gray hair.
But she wasn’t Charlotte, who stepped from the fog and approached the car.
“You’re all right,” Aaron said, breathing a sigh of relief that she hadn’t been in the car—or entered the hospital yet.
She shook her head in denial, but he figured she was referring to her emotional state rather than her physical condition.
“It’s Sandy. The nurse who took care of me,” Charlotte said, identifying the woman. “She tried to help me, and look what she got for her trouble. Dead.”
“Driver’s dead, too,” Whit informed them. He flipped open a wallet he’d taken off the body. A curse whistled between his teeth.
“What?” Aaron asked.
“It’s that kid,” Whit replied, “the young investigative reporter who approached one of Stanley Jessup’s editors with the story about Princess Gabriella being here.”
“The nurse must have been his source,” Aaron said, leaning inside the car to see that the reporter had also been shot in the back of the head like the woman.
They had probably been meeting in the parking lot to discuss what she’d witnessed that evening when someone had executed them. He suspected that their killer had been hiding in the backseat, like Whit had back at Jessup’s rented cottage.
“That’s why they were killed, Charlotte,” he told her, trying to ease her guilt. She hadn’t asked to be kidnapped and held hostage in this place. “It had nothing to do with you.”
She shrugged off his reassurance. “It had everything to do with me. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been here. They would both still be alive.”
He couldn’t absolve her of guilt she was determined to hold on to—just as Whit hadn’t been able to absolve him three years ago when he’d thought Josie had been murdered on their watch. The only thing that might help her was learning the truth.
&
nbsp; “Then we need to find out who put you in here,” he said, “because that’s who’s really responsible for these deaths.”
“We don’t know that,” Whit said, his dark gaze narrowed with suspicion as he stared at Charlotte. Maybe he’d taken her claim of responsibility literally.
As Aaron lifted the nurse’s body back into the car, he noted that her skin was already cold. “She’s been dead awhile,” he said. “They were probably killed shortly after Charlotte and I broke out of here. And our only lead to finding out who is behind all this is in that hospital.”
He gestured back at the three-story building. But Whit continued to study Charlotte. He obviously thought she was a more viable lead. But if she knew who’d put her in this place, she would have no desire to go back inside.
Instead she drew in an audible breath and started across the lot toward the building.
He caught her arm. “You can’t go back in there.”
She pointed back at the car with the blood-spattered windows. “It’s not any safer out here.”
“She’s right,” Whit miraculously agreed. “We should all stick together.”
Aaron figured his old partner just didn’t want Charlotte getting away again before he’d had a chance to interrogate her. But, even though they didn’t trust each other, maybe they would all be safer if they stayed together.
Because wasn’t the saying to keep your enemies closer…
*
CHARLOTTE ACHED WITH the desire to throw her arms around Aaron’s neck and cling to him. She was afraid, but her inclination had less to do with fear and more to do with relief. When she’d first realized that was blood dripping down the car windows, she’d thought that Aaron might have been inside—that he might have beaten her there using some back roads and…
Her breath hitched with a sob she held inside. She’d learned at an early age that tears were a waste of time. They had never swayed her mother from doing what she’d wanted and had never made the selfish woman care about her. She doubted crying would make Aaron care, either.
He was already in love with another woman. But why hadn’t he pressed her for Josie’s whereabouts? Ironically, she was close. That was why Michigan had sounded familiar to Charlotte because she had brought Josie here for her new life.
It would be even more ironic if this was where Charlotte lost her life. But Aaron was determined to keep her safe. That was why he was still here—because it was his job. Even more than that, it was his honor. He was the kind of man who enjoyed playing white knight to helpless damsels. He was a true hero—in wartime and peace. That was why Charlotte had been so drawn to him.
But she was no damsel in distress, so she should have known that they could never be…
“Are we doing this?” Whit asked, breaking the silence that had fallen between them as she stared up at Aaron’s handsome face.
His gaze was locked with hers, as if he was trying to figure out what she was thinking. Or plotting…
Aaron nodded. “Yeah, we’re doing this.”
“What’s the plan?” Whit persisted.
“We go in the employee entrance, but we bypass the locker room and cafeteria and take the back stairs up to the administrator’s office.”
Whit whistled in appreciation. “You know the layout of the place.”
“I interviewed here and then worked a day before I even tried getting inside her room,” Aaron explained.
A grin tipped up a corner of his sexy mouth. “And then I got tossed out on my ass after I got caught coming out of her room.”
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” she remembered with a flash of the panic she’d felt then. “I thought you’d been shot.”
“Not yet,” Aaron said with a glance back at the car where two people had been shot. “But we have to make this quick. Get in, get into the administrator’s records, and get the hell out!”
“Good plan,” Whit mused.
The first test was getting past the lock at the security gate. They all breathed a sigh of relief that a swipe of the card turned the light from red to green.
“I thought they might have deactivated them.” Aaron spoke aloud the fear she’d been harboring, too. “Guess they didn’t think we’d be stupid enough to come back.”
But they were wrong. It probably was very stupid to return to the place they’d barely escaped the first time.
No one accosted them between the employee entrance and the stairwell to the second floor and the office suites. But the administrator’s office was not empty. A light glowed behind the frosted glass in the door, and a machine buzzed inside, the floor vibrating with the low drone of it.
“She’s shredding papers,” Charlotte said, her stomach lurching with a sick feeling of hopelessness.
“The records are online,” Aaron assured her—giving her hope as he had in the parking lot. Trying to make her feel better.
He was such a damn good man. That was why she reached for the door handle, trying to enter first. Whoever had put her in this place wanted her baby; she doubted anyone would shoot at her. But Aaron apparently wasn’t willing to take that chance. He held her back, and with a nod at Whit, the two men burst through the door with their weapons drawn.
The woman standing behind the desk wore a power suit and had an air of authority—even with her ash-blond hair falling out of the bun on top of her head and dark circles blackening the skin beneath her eyes. She had to be the administrator. She confronted them with a hard stare and slight smile—more triumphant than fearful. She had definitely suspected that they would come back.
“It’s too late,” Dr. Mona Platt, per the nameplate on her desk, said. “I wiped the hard drive. Everything’s gone…”
Charlotte shook her head. She would not be denied. She had gone too long without knowing what had happened to her. “Everything’s not gone,” she pointed out. “You’re still here.”
“I’m not going to tell you anything,” the woman stubbornly insisted.
“You’ll talk to us or the police,” Aaron threatened her.
“What will I talk to the police about?” Dr. Platt asked, waving her hand over the paper shredder. “There is nothing to talk about.”
Charlotte’s anger flared, energizing her as her pulse raced. “You held me captive in this place!”
The woman’s thin lips pursed into a tight line of defiance and denial. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You restrained me to a bed,” Charlotte accused, “and had a guard posted outside my door with a gun.”
“We do not employ armed guards at Serenity House,” the administrator replied prissily.
Aaron snorted at that claim.
Charlotte pointed to the bruise on her head. “Mr. Centerenian nearly killed me with that gun!”
“Mr. Centerenian was not employed by Serenity House.”
“Who was he employed by?” Whit threw the question out there. “Who paid him and who paid for this woman’s stay here?”
“I cannot violate doctor-patient confidentiality clauses,” Dr. Platt persisted. “Or the privacy law.”
“I am the patient!” Charlotte snapped. “So you’re going to damn well tell me who paid you to keep me here!”
“I will not—”
Charlotte lifted her gun and pointed the barrel directly at the woman. “You will tell me!”
“You won’t shoot me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Whit warned the doctor. “She can’t be trusted.”
“And since I was confined to a psychiatric hospital, I must be out of my mind.” She moved her finger to the trigger. “I could probably use an insanity plea to get out of jail time.”
“Then you’d wind up spending the rest of your life in a place like this,” Dr. Platt threatened.
“At least I’ll be alive…”
The woman’s eyes narrowed with her own temper. “You should be thanking me.”
A laugh, at the woman’s audacity, burst out of Charlotte’s
lips. “God, lady, you should be committed here yourself instead of running the place. What the hell do you think I should be thanking you for?”
Dr. Platt pointed toward Charlotte’s belly. “You should thank me for your baby. You owe me for its life.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Aaron asked the question before Charlotte could.
She pressed her palm over her stomach, as if her hand alone could protect her baby from this crazy woman. “You—you did this? You impregnated me?”
The doctor shook her head, knocking more brittle blond strands of hair loose from the bun. “I was supposed to—with special sperm. But you were already pregnant. I didn’t tell him that, or he would have had me terminate it. You have me to thank for your baby.”
“My baby…” But it wasn’t just her baby. It was Aaron’s baby, too. Even though they had used protection that one night they’d been together, it must have failed…because he was the only man she’d been with recently. In a long while, actually. She turned toward him, and when she met his gaze, she knew he knew.
*
AARON WAS GOING to be a father. The baby was his.
The thought stole his breath away for a moment.
Whit had no such problems. “Who is he?” he demanded to know.
“The father?” Dr. Platt asked with a sniffle of disinterest. “I don’t know.” And she obviously didn’t much care. She turned toward Charlotte. “Do you remember? Or are you still suffering from amnesia?”
If the look on Charlotte’s face was any indication, she knew—with as much certainty as he knew. The baby was his. But that wasn’t Whit’s question.
So the tenacious Mr. Howell repeated it. “Who is the man who paid you to make her pregnant with his sperm? Who brought her here?”
“That guard—the one with the gun—Mr. Centerenian is the one who brought her here,” Dr. Platt replied. “And he hired a private nurse, too, who only took care of the princess.”
“The princess…” Whit murmured the words.
“I am not Princess Gabriella,” Charlotte replied.
The woman laughed now. “And you don’t think you belong here? You’ve either still got amnesia or you’re crazy.”
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