by Julie Miller
“Why, yes, so I see.” He was reading Dwight’s license now. “Dwight Powers of the district attorney’s office.” He tossed aside the wallet. “I see a little conflict of interest here, Mr. Powers. How do you intend to prosecute me?”
“If you harm this woman or her family, I intend to kill you.”
“Dwight.” But both men were ignoring her now.
“Oh, I’m counting on that. You see, I am a clever little man,” Fairfax insisted. “I think I’ll use your attachment to Ms. McCallister to my advantage.”
“What attach—” Maddie gasped as Fairfax snatched her by the collar of her jacket and jerked her forward.
Dwight spun and reached for her, but she never felt the grasp of his hand. Instead, she shivered at how cold and deadly the tip of the gun felt when Fairfax pressed it to the middle of her forehead. “Back off, Mr. ADA.”
It was threat enough for Dwight to raise his hands in surrender and keep his place behind her.
“It’s okay, Dwight,” she insisted, less worried about herself than the two guns, the mysterious syringe and Dwight’s fierce penchant for rescuing her.
“Now you’re the protector, hmm?” That fact seemed to amuse Fairfax. “It’s been a very entertaining conversation, but we’re the only ones hearing it. You passed through a dampening field about two miles back. If any of your friends were following you, your signal was scattered. They’ll have a pretty wide search grid of woods and farmland to look through before they find you.”
Maddie cringed as Fairfax untucked her blouse and reached underneath to pull the wire off her. She felt Dwight’s breath stirring the hair at her nape, the rhythm of his lungs quickening as his need to defend her ratcheted up a notch.
Fairfax lingered a little too long at her breasts, enjoyed the sting of tape ripping off skin a little too much for her to remain afraid. She inhaled a deep breath and gave him her best Dwight Powers glare. “Get your hands off me.”
She looked down at those very hands and noticed that, in contrast to his tailored suit and tie, Craig Fairfax had the hands of a construction worker. She glanced toward the open panel where Morales and his buddy had entered. “Let me guess. You remodeled this place with secret doors and passageways?”
“Kind of fun, isn’t it?” And then Fairfax’s smile flat-lined. “I’m done chatting. Where’s Tyler?”
“You could have killed him two days ago in that parking garage.”
He glanced at Morales. “That moron was supposed to take out Roberta, not endanger the child.”
“Hey, I’m in the room.”
Fairfax ignored his hired help. “She wasn’t supposed to be there with you and Tyler.”
“Roberta knew you were after her. She was trying to protect us from you.”
Fairfax scoffed. “That’s loyalty, isn’t it? For years, I gave her what she wanted. A chance to put kids in the homes of parents who really want them.”
“At the cost of innocent lives?”
“It’s good business.”
Maddie shook her head. “You’re a bastard.”
“Yeah, but I’m a rich one. Now where’s Tyler?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t give me that crap. I get enough of it from your niece.”
Hope spiked. “Katie’s still alive?”
“She won’t be for long if you don’t start talking. I have a client waiting for a baby boy to be delivered or his hundred-fifty grand to be refunded. I’ve already spent his money.”
“My heart’s breaking.” Sarcasm leaked through Maddie’s teeth. “I won’t tell you where he is.”
He ground the gun barrel against her scalp. “Tell me!”
“Threats don’t work on the McCallister women,” Dwight said from behind her, his voice as deadly and deep as she’d ever heard it. “They fight back.”
Take this guy? Fight back?
Dwight’s message finally rang through, loud and clear.
Maddie’s breath lodged deep in her chest. Oh, God. Three against two? Unarmed against guns? She wasn’t a fighter.
“Go get the girl,” Fairfax ordered, tapping the gun against Maddie’s temple. “I bet if we put a gun to Katie’s head, this one’ll talk.”
Not a fighter?
The hell she wasn’t.
“No!” With a primal, maternal scream from deep in her lungs, Maddie smacked the gun out of her face and punched Fairfax square in the nose. Something popped. Blood streamed from his devilish face. Maddie shook her throbbing hand as pain spiked through her knuckles and her fingers went numb. “How the hell do you—”
“Move, Red!” Dwight shoved her to the floor and rammed his shoulder into Fairfax’s startled body.
The gun exploded as the two men flew through the air, landed on a coffee table and crushed it. “Dwight!”
Maddie pushed herself to her feet, ducking as chips of plaster and wood rained down from the wall where the bullet struck.
“Get him off me!” Fairfax yelled in a stuffy, nasally whine. Even with a gun, he was no match for Dwight’s meaty fists and raging strength.
But the charging hulk and wiry Morales were another story. When they charged Dwight, Maddie leaped onto Morales’s back, winding her arms around his neck, clawing her nails into his face.
“Get off me, bitch!”
The big man kicked Dwight in the side. Dwight grunted and rolled. A gun skittered away beneath Fairfax’s desk. Maddie scratched for Morales’s eyes.
“I said…” Morales stumbled. He dropped the box and syringe and clamped down on Maddie’s wrists. “Get…off!”
He slammed backward into a wall, knocking the wind from Maddie’s lungs. Twisting her wrists at a painful angle, he pried her off him and threw her to the floor. When she tried to rise, he smacked her across the face.
“Stay down!”
The room was spinning, crashing around her. She tasted blood and tried to crawl someplace safe. Karen must have felt like this—helpless, hurt. But she wasn’t Karen. This wasn’t any man she loved who’d betrayed her. She was a fighter. She’d learned how to stand up for herself. She fought back.
Dwight took a blow that knocked him to the floor. Fairfax scrambled for his gun. The big man had his hands around Dwight’s neck. She had to help him.
The instant Maddie moved, Morales grabbed her by the hair and jerked her head back. Pain tore across her scalp and tears stung her eyes. Her fingers scrambled for something to defend herself with. He stuck his stinky breath right in her face. “I said stay down!” There. Her fingers closed around the long, plastic cylinder. “Or I will do to you what I did to all those other—”
Maddie jabbed the syringe into Morales’s ankle and squeezed the plunger, driving the contents deep into his leg.
Morales screamed as he released her. Maddie collapsed as he stumbled back. “What have you done to me?” His breathing became shallow and static. He tripped on an overturned chair and fell to the floor, his stunned eyes damning her. “You’ve killed me.”
If Maddie could catch her own breath, she’d have demanded to know if he’d killed Whitney Chiles, if he’d given this same drug to Katie. She’d want to know how many other lives he’d ruined with his greed and temper and killer combo of drugs.
But Morales was dead before she could speak.
A shot rang out and a man grunted in pain.
“Dwight?” Maddie’s voice squeaked from her raw lungs and aching jaw.
The big man was rolling on the floor, holding his gut, bleeding from the wound in his belly. A gun dangled in Dwight’s left hand as he pushed himself to his feet. Summoning a leviathan’s strength from his battered body, he stood straight and tall. Maddie crouched low as he whirled the gun around the room.
“He’s gone,” Dwight announced.
For a moment, she didn’t understand. She was too overwhelmed with relief to see him standing after that fight. With one eye swelling shut and blood oozing from a scrape along his jaw, he looked like a prizefighter who’d gone ten
rounds with an opponent and come up short. And right now, he was the damn handsomest sight she’d ever seen. She started to smile.
But then she understood. She knew.
“Fairfax.” Maddie clung to the wall and pulled herself up. “We can’t let him get away.”
“He won’t.” Dwight tucked the gun into the back of his waist and kicked aside broken furniture to get to her and help her stand. As soon as he touched her, he pulled her into his arms and wrapped her up in a fierce hug. “Are you all right? How bad are you hurt?”
She clung to him just as tightly. “Nothing serious. Are you okay?”
“I’ll mend.” He pulled back just enough to look down into her face. His stormy eyes took in every bump, bruise and freckle that might be out of place. He pressed his thumb to her lips and gently wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth. “I thought I was going to lose you.”
“You haven’t yet.” She reached up and framed his beloved, beaten face in her hands. “And you won’t. But until we stop Fairfax and find Katie, I don’t have time to try to convince you of that.”
He pressed a quick, desperate kiss to her lips. They both groaned in a mixture of pain and passion. But then he was pushing away. He crossed to the phone on Fairfax’s desk and handed it to her. “Call 911. Get a couple of ambulances out here. Tell them to put you through to A.J. Give him a description of the gravel roads, the iron fence, the building—anything to get them out here ASAP. Then you can tear this place from top to bottom to find Katie.”
He pushed the phone into her hand and hurried toward the open passageway in the wall where Fairfax had disappeared. “What are you going to do?” she asked, already punching in the number.
“I’m going to track down the son of a bitch who put a gun to the head of the woman I love.”
LOVE?
Dwight loved her?
Were there any other women he knew who’d been held at gunpoint recently? Maddie shook her head. “Stupid. Stupid debate.”
It would be a cruel lie. But Dwight hadn’t lied to her yet. He’d promised to always tell her the truth, even when it was something she didn’t want to hear.
Could she trust that it was the truth if they were words she did want to hear?
The hoping and second-guessing and worrying that Dwight would find Fairfax before Fairfax’s gun found him was plenty enough to keep Maddie from finding what she was looking for. Her room-to-room search had turned up one baby girl, the girl’s sedated mother—a blond teenager whose steady pulse had reassured her that it was all right to leave and keep searching—and no one else.
Panic began to seep into the fringes of her already-shot nerves. These were the longest ten minutes of her life. The cops weren’t coming. Dwight hadn’t returned. She was all alone. Maddie stood in front of the nursery window and looked up and down the abandoned hallway. “Katie, where are you?”
She couldn’t lose her.
Saving Katie was as close as she could come to saving her sister. She understood now about Dwight’s obsession with keeping her safe, with protecting her at all costs. She wasn’t strong enough to lose anyone else she cared about, either.
“Katie!” Maddie’s shout echoed through the empty corridors. Flat white walls. Even strips of paneling. One office, one nursery and six patient rooms. She’d searched every one from top to bottom. From door to door. From wall to wall.
Wall to wall. Maddie tipped her head back and shook her fists. “Idiot.”
Hidden walls. Secret passageways. Katie could still be here. Craig Fairfax liked his secrets. He liked building things. A physical irony for a man who liked tearing people and families apart.
“Katie?” Maddie kept calling her niece’s name as she ran her fingers along every inch of paneling, looking for a hidden room. When that search didn’t pan out, she found herself staring at the one door she hadn’t opened. The janitor’s closet. “Why not?”
She might have detected the blare of sirens in the distance, or maybe that was wishful thinking as she opened the door. Crinkling her nose at the pungent smell of ammonia, she reached overhead to turn on the light. But something else caught her eye instead. A thin, dim line of light across the floor.
A frisson of possibility skipped across her nerves, rekindling her hope. “Katie?” She knelt down to trace the tiny gap with her fingers and found a perpendicular line where the gap turned to form a doorway. “Katie?” Maddie pounded the back wall with the flat of her hand. “Katie?” She found the hinges of the hidden door and threw herself against the smooth panel until a spring gave way and the door popped open. “Katie!”
Maddie dashed through the opening, hearing the soft beep of a medical monitor before her eyes adjusted to the dim light and she spotted the steel-framed hospital bed. There was a lump in the middle of the bed, someone tucked in beneath the sheets. “Katie?”
She darted to the bed, stroked the dark hair resting on the pillow. “Katie, sweetheart.” Maddie felt the cool cheek with gentle fingers, waited for warm breath to brush across her hand. “Katie?”
Fumbling in the darkness, Maddie worked her way past wires and switches and machines until she found a string and pulled it. She squeezed her eyes shut as a circle of light pooled around the bed.
But the pain was nothing compared to the joy of seeing her niece’s wan face, scooping her into her arms and hugging her tight. “Katie! It’s me! Wake up! I found you. We’re going home.”
“Or not.”
Craig Fairfax’s stuffy, broken face materialized from a dark corner of the room.
Maddie cradled Katie’s groggy weight against her, turning her shoulder to protect the child who’d just been returned to her arms from the gun Fairfax pointed their way.
“What is it with you McCallister women?” Fairfax shook his fist as he advanced. “This one charges to the rescue to save a friend. You charge in to save her. She takes away the baby I paid for. You take away the business that has paid me so well for so long.” He uncurled his fist and pointed a finger at Maddie. “I like a good, submissive woman who does what she’s told, who doesn’t give me any grief. I had my sister trained. I had my girls trained. And then you two…”
Maddie clutched Katie tighter, watching the gun barrel creep closer and closer. She felt Katie stirring against her. Felt her own heart pounding against her ribs and throbbing through every aching bone in her body.
“You know, even if the police capture me—” cold steel touched her temple “—I will have the satisfaction of shutting you two bitches up.” He pointed the gun at Katie and Maddie flinched. “I just can’t decide which one of you to shoot first.”
“Dwight won’t let you get away with this.” The fight hadn’t died in her yet. Love wouldn’t let it die. “He’s not a man you want to mess with.”
“You just can’t keep quiet, can you?” He pointed the gun to Maddie’s head. “Thanks for making the decision for me.”
A black shadow, large and ominous, filled the room behind Fairfax.
Maddie smiled.
Dwight brought his gun down across the back of Fairfax’s head. The man crumpled at Maddie’s feet, unconscious.
Dwight retrieved Fairfax’s gun, stuck both weapons in his belt, heaved a sigh through that mighty chest and reached for Maddie. “That—” his arms folded around her and Katie both “—was getting old.”
Maddie looped an arm around his neck and hugged him tight. She clutched him even tighter when he lifted her onto her toes and buried his face in her hair. She felt the tremors racking his body. Tears spilled down her own cheeks when she felt his first tears burning against her skin.
“I’m okay, Dwight. We’re okay.” She pressed kisses to his neck, his shoulder, his collar. “You saved us. You saved us.”
They stood together for countless minutes, until the flood of emotions had worked their way through him and he could lift his head and speak. But the words she’d hoped to hear again weren’t there. This was the old Dwight, back to business. He kissed her forehea
d and urged her to step aside as he leaned over the bed and picked up Katie in his arms.
Cradling the precious cargo gently against his chest, he led them out of the hidden room and into the bright light of the hallway. “The police are here,” Dwight informed Maddie, striding down the hallway toward the front exit. “I pulled some wires from the vehicles outside so Fairfax couldn’t escape. An ambulance is on its way for Katie.”
“There’s another girl here, too. And a baby.”
“A.J.’s on his way. He’ll do his job. He’ll take care of them.”
“Mr. Powers?” Katie’s slurred voice was muffled against Dwight’s chest.
Maddie tugged at his arm to stop him. She circled around and stroked her niece’s hair. “Katie? Sweetie? I love you. You’re going to be okay now. We’ll get you to a real hospital, then take you home. You’ll be okay.”
Katie nodded, though her eyes never opened. “Is Tyler safe, Mr. Powers? Did Whit get him to you?”
“Yeah, Katie.” His deep voice rumbled in his chest. “Tyler’s safe. We’re all safe.”
Tyler. Not the kid.
Maddie lifted her startled gaze to Dwight, whose one good gray-green eye was looking intently down at her.
“You said Tyler.”
Maybe he was ready to love a new family again.
Dwight leaned over Katie and touched his lips to Maddie’s. Hers were swollen and sore, but she didn’t care. Dwight’s kiss was gentle and hot and very, very thorough.
“Aunt Maddie? Is zat you?” Katie pushed against Dwight’s and Maddie’s chins with a weak fist.
Maddie pulled back, linking her fingers with Katie’s. “Yes, sweetie. What is it?”
“When did you get a boyfriend?”
Epilogue
Seven months later
Dwight unlocked the front door and stepped into the organized chaos that filled his big home. He set his briefcase and keys on the table in the foyer and paused a moment to straighten a framed photograph that adorned the wall.
“Hey, Uncle Dwight.” Katie bounced around the corner in blue jeans and a jacket, with a tall, strapping football player in tow.