Mystery Bride

by Daniels, B. J.

  Samantha didn’t relish the idea of seeing Cassie. She still harbored hard feelings toward her former roommate, and seeing the woman would only bring back painful memories. But she couldn’t ignore the pain she heard in Cassie’s voice, either.

  Still, if the woman cared so much about her son, why had she left him? How could she have given up her child like that?

  “Cassie—”

  “Please, Sam.”

  She heard tears in Cassie’s voice. Real or not, they affected her. And she did need answers. Why Cassie had them was another question altogether.

  “You’re in Seattle, right?”

  “No, I’m in Butte. I just assumed you’d come back here first, before you headed for Seattle.”

  Samantha felt her heart begin to pound.

  “I could meet you at your office,” Cassie was saying. “Or your house.”

  Cassie knew Samantha had a house? The same house that had been ransacked three nights ago? She felt a chill slog through her veins. “No, that wouldn’t be a good place to meet. I had to grab Zack right in front of the rest home. By now the police are probably looking for me.” She hoped that was a lie.

  If she had to meet Cassie somewhere, she wanted it to be in a public place. She’d be carrying a lot of baggage from the past and she wanted their meeting to be as quick and painless as possible. She also wanted Zack and Will where she could see them. And she couldn’t be sure the kidnappers weren’t waiting for her at her house. Or her office.

  “We could meet at the Butte mall.”

  “The mall?” Cassie sounded a little surprised.

  “In the food court.”

  “You’ll have Zack with you?” she asked anxiously.

  “Yes. He’ll be with me.”

  “I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

  Was it possible that Cassie really did love Zack? Had she known she’d make a terrible mother and that’s why she left Zack and Lucas?

  “Just tell me when to be there,” Cassie said.

  Samantha glanced at her watch. She was more than four hundred miles away. “I could be there by eight.”

  “Eight?” Cassie paused. “Eight will be fine. The mall won’t be real busy at that hour. I’ll see you there. If anything should happen, I’ll stop by your office.” Cassie hung up—but not before Sam heard another voice in the background. A man’s voice. Lucas?

  What had she meant, if anything should happen?

  She snapped off the phone with an unladylike curse. Every instinct in her cried, Turn Zack over to the authorities. Let them sort this out. Don’t get any more involved than you already are. There is something terribly wrong with this whole mess.

  But even as she thought it, she knew she couldn’t. If she went to the cops now, they’d turn Zack over to Cassie until Lucas could be found. And after all these years, Cassie suddenly wanted to see her son a little too desperately. Why was that?

  “Is everything all right?” Will asked as he came out of the bathroom. His frown indicated he’d at least heard her colorful curse. Maybe more.

  “Fine,” she fibbed. “I’ll get Zack. We’d better eat, and then get going.”

  Reviewing the too-brief, disturbing telephone conversation, she fell upon the two things she knew. Cassie had sounded anxious—anxious to see Zack. And a little scared. Samantha shivered. What was it Cassie wasn’t telling her? Something about Lucas? And why did Samantha fear it was something she didn’t want to hear?

  In the bedroom, Sam woke Zack and got him dressed. He slipped on the backpack, hugged his CD player to him, and tugged the headphones up over his ears under his cap, now-familiar music leaking out.

  She gently slipped the headphones from his ears. “We need to talk,” she said, and led him out to the living room. He perched on the edge of the couch, and she sat down across from him. He looked wary.

  “Zack, I need your help. I have to know what’s going on so I can find your dad and keep you safe. If you know anything about your dad or the two men who took you or why, please tell me now.”

  He stared at her, his eyes dark, but still he said nothing.

  “Are you afraid they’ll come after you again?”

  He shook his head, but not very convincingly.

  “I wouldn’t let them take you.”

  He eyed her skeptically.

  “Come on, I got you away from them, didn’t I? And I lost them when they tried to chase us, didn’t I?”

  He smiled a little. “Yeah.”

  “So have some faith. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve.”

  He seemed to accept that she just might. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Will. He didn’t seem as happy to hear about the tricks up her sleeve.

  “They didn’t hurt you, did they?” she asked, trying a different tack.

  “No,” he said quickly. “They were okay.”

  “What did they feed you?” she asked, having already witnessed at dinner his fondness for food.

  His eyes lit as he recited a list of junk foods from quarter-pounders to pizza pockets. “…and cinnamon rolls and cookies and popcorn.”

  Geez, he’d eaten enough to bankrupt the kidnappers. But there had been no ransom note. With Lucas missing, where would they have sent one?

  “Then they fed you all right,” she said.

  “Oh yeah,” he said enthusiastically. “They let me have anything I wanted, and they had really cool stuff.”

  “Where were they taking you when I came along?”

  He shrugged.

  “You never overheard them talking about what they were going to do or why?”

  “They didn’t say much of anything.”

  Why didn’t she believe that?

  She could feel Will’s gaze on her. She hadn’t been completely honest with him when he’d asked about her plans yesterday. Those plans were a little more complex than just getting Zack to Seattle.

  She tried a different approach. “What about their names. They did call each other by name, right?”

  He seemed to think about that for a moment. “Al.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “The real nice little one.”

  “And the larger of the two?”

  Zack studied the rug. “Ralph.”

  Al and Ralph? She watched his face, wondering if he was lying and what reason he’d have to do so. Did he want to protect his kidnappers? She remembered how easily he’d come with her when she’d abducted him. She had a feeling that he’d been handed off to a lot of people in his young life.

  “Had you ever seen the men before?”

  Zack shook his head. Samantha glanced over at Will. He was frowning slightly, but she knew that might not have anything to do with the boy’s story. He’d been frowning a lot since he’d gotten into her car yesterday.

  But he’d be gone soon. With the first bus station, airport or car rental agency they saw.

  She looked at Zack again, wanting to ask him more but realizing it wouldn’t do any good. They had some time before they reached Butte. Maybe he’d open up when the two of them were alone.

  She just hoped she could win his trust before it was too late. Because she had a bad feeling about what was waiting for them up the road.

  Chapter Five

  “We won’t be taking the Firebird.”

  Will stopped in the garage doorway to look back at Samantha. She wore jeans and a shirt, the top open, exposing just a hint of freckled chest. After having seen her attire yesterday, he felt as if he already knew her body fairly well. But as she stepped past him and into the garage—the jeans molding her bottom, the shirt flashing just a hint of tanned bare skin—he felt as if everything about her was a mystery he needed to solve. Wanted to solve.

  “We’re not taking the Firebird?” he asked, suddenly worried.

  He and Zack hung back as she opened the second garage stall. In the darkness inside, he glimpsed a glint of chrome. A few moments later an engine turned over, and she backed out in their new ride. />
  Unable to let go of his first erroneous impression of the woman, he’d been rather hoping for a Lexus or a Camry or an Accord. No such luck.

  The black Bronco she drove out of the garage made him nervous. It had oversize, nubby, off-road tires, sounded souped up, and made him fear that they’d be needing its four-wheel drive capabilities before they reached the next town.

  Reluctantly, he opened the rear door of the Bronco for Zack and waited while the boy and his backpack got in.

  “I liked your other car,” Zack grumbled as he buckled up.

  “Maybe it’s cooler than you think,” she said cryptically. “You’ll see.”

  Will hoped not. If they needed the Bronco’s “special powers,” they’d be in some sort of trouble again. Being on the run wasn’t in his life’s blueprint.

  And he knew they wouldn’t be switching cars if Samantha wasn’t worried. The thought definitely made him anxious.

  As he climbed into the front seat, he looked back at Zack. The kid’s headphones were on, his baseball cap pulled low, that uninterested somewhere-else look in his eyes again. Will wondered if the boy’s kidnappers had fallen for it. He had a feeling they’d probably underestimated this kid.

  After what he’d overheard of Samantha’s phone call with Zack’s birth mother this morning, he was all the more curious about the kid. And Samantha. What role did she play in all this?

  From what he could gather from the conversation, Cassie had hired Samantha to get Zack and had known somehow that the kidnappers had taken Zack to the rest home in Wolf Point. Lucas owned a company called Whiz Kidz and was in some sort of trouble that might involve his ex-wife Mercedes.

  He was more confused than ever. But it sounded as if Samantha planned to meet Cassie in Butte and get some answers. He didn’t trust Cassie and didn’t think Samantha should, either. He didn’t like the idea, but reminded himself it wasn’t any of his business.

  Samantha drove in silence, winding the Bronco down the narrow dirt to the stretch of straight blacktop that pointed west like an arrow. There was little traffic at this time of the morning. It felt as if they were the only people left on the planet.

  Zack fell asleep only a few miles down the road. Will slipped the headphones from the boy’s ears and tried to make him comfortable. Zack stirred awake just long enough to hug his backpack snugly, then dozed off again, his breathing rhythmic, his eyelids fluttering like butterflies as he dreamed.

  “There’s something in his backpack,” Will whispered conspiratorially to Samantha.

  She looked over at him in obvious surprise. “What do you mean, ‘something’?”

  He shook his head, not wanting to let on that he’d listened in on her phone conversation. “Something. Something he’s real protective of. Haven’t you noticed? He hasn’t let that backpack out of his sight. He even sleeps with it.”

  Her look said she’d noticed. She seemed to study Will, probably wondering why he should care. After today, he’d never see either of them again.

  “Thanks. I’ll take a look.”

  For an instant, her gaze locked with his. The air inside the Bronco seemed to compact. Suddenly it felt too close, too confined, way too intimate. The engine throbbed. His heart rate felt in sync with its powerful beat.

  Then she broke the connection, looked back to the highway.

  He listened to the hum of the tires on the blacktop and watched the early cold morning rush by like wisps of fog. Slowly, he released his held breath. Next to him, he thought he heard her let out a similar sigh.

  They passed through one small sleeping community after another. Hinsdale. Saco. Sleeping Buffalo. By the time the sun had come up and filled the Bronco with some warmth, Zack was awake and complaining he was hungry, although he’d eaten two huge pieces of coffee cake, a large glass of milk and a banana before they’d left.

  Samantha laughed as she slowed for the town squatting on the flat horizon: Malta, Montana. Home of the Mustangs, and the first town that looked as if it might be large enough to at least have a bus station.

  “I’m hungry,” Zack groaned sleepily from the back seat.

  “You must have a bottomless stomach or a hollow leg,” she joked. “As soon as we drop Will off so he can get back to Wolf Point, I’ll get you something to eat.”

  “There’s a place—” the boy cried. “I’m real hungry. I need a hamburger. And some fries. And a vanilla milk shake. No, make it chocolate.”

  “Zack, it’s eight in the morning!” she shot back.

  “Go ahead and feed him first,” Will told her.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, glancing over.

  Her eyes were that warm tropical blue-green in the morning sunlight and her freckles were like gold dust on her nose and cheekbones. He nodded. Once Zack was fed, Samantha could continue on to Seattle via the Butte mall.

  And Will would go home.

  But he wasn’t quite ready yet to tell them goodbye, and the silent admission didn’t please him. The one-sided conversation he’d overheard between Samantha and Zack’s birth mother had left him with a bad feeling he couldn’t quite shake. He feared Samantha had gotten into more than she could handle.

  AS SAM PARKED in the large lot at the rear of a café that served burgers twenty-four hours a day, she felt a chill on her neck. She glanced around. They were miles from where she’d seen the kidnappers go off the road yesterday, were now driving a different rig, and she hadn’t seen any sign of a tail.

  Still, she felt uneasy. Much different from the way Will Sheridan made her feel. And oh lordy, how he made her feel.

  “What about you? You up for a burger, fries and a shake?” she asked, her voice sounding a lot lighter than she felt. “Or are you a ham and eggs and hash browns kind of guy?”

  She doubted Will Sheridan had ever had a hamburger, fries and a shake at eight in the morning in his life. No more than he’d ever been handcuffed to a Firebird’s dash before. Well, at least he’d never get into a strange car again. Let alone refuse to get out. Something about that made her sad because she knew he’d also be more careful about the next woman he asked out.

  She hated what she’d done to him and wished there was something she could do or say to make it up to him. Dangerous thinking. Even more dangerous, she almost wished she were the woman he’d first thought she was.

  She realized she had been once. A long time ago. Before Lucas and Cassie and Zack.

  “I’d have a little something to eat,” Will said.

  “Great.” She didn’t feel the least bit hungry, but if Zack was— He seemed small for his age. She definitely didn’t want him to go hungry.

  As she slid into a booth with Zack, she could hear faint music coming from his CD player. He had his cap pulled low, his ears protruding, those damn headphones like a wall between him and the outside world.

  She reached over and tugged one side of the headphones down. “Not in the restaurant,” she mouthed.

  He nodded reluctantly but did as he was told.

  “Put the CD player in your backpack,” she said, wondering how she would ever get close to the boy. Or if she would.

  In the end, she ordered what Zack did: a cheese-burger loaded, fries and a chocolate shake. To her amazement, so did Will.

  “Living dangerously?” she joked, and could have bitten her tongue when his gaze came up to meet hers.

  “Definitely,” he said, his look blistering.

  WILL CURSED the chemistry that arced across the worn Formica table between them. His attraction to this woman bothered him. He was much too sensible to let himself fall for the wrong woman. A woman who was a complete mystery to him. Who could turn him inside out and disrupt the world he’d made for himself. What did he really know about her, other than the fact that she kissed wonderfully, was a private investigator in Butte, and stole children?

  He watched her drag her gaze away, her teeth worrying at her lower lip as she looked out the window. He’d seen her scanning the street earlier, her look searching an
d concerned. Was she afraid she hadn’t lost the two men who’d kidnapped Zack? Or was being cautious the nature of her business?

  A dense silence fell over the table even with the clatter of the café around them. Samantha looked uncomfortable. And he knew he was the cause. He’d come on like gangbusters, wanting to date her, romance her, refusing to get out of her car until he had her phone number. Then he’d backed off big-time.

  He knew he should say something now. But he couldn’t imagine what. It’s been fun, didn’t really cover it. Nor did Thanks for everything.

  Not half a block down the street, he noticed, there was a sign for car rentals. He could walk to it once they’d finished eating. Wouldn’t even have to get back into the Bronco with Samantha and Zack. He felt an almost desperate need to return to his old life as quickly as possible. To touch base with the guiding principles that had gotten him this far. To decide what to do next. Never before had he needed a plan more than he did right now.

  Amazingly, Zack put away most of his food in record time. Samantha picked at hers, her attention seeming to wander. Will caught her watching the street again. Or maybe she was just avoiding looking at him.

  “Well,” he said, when they’d all eaten as much as they were going to. “It looks like I can get a car right up the street—” He motioned toward the car rental sign.

  Her gaze followed his and she nodded, then looked at him again as if she felt the need to say something. But the moment seemed to pass. No doubt, she didn’t know what to say any more than he did.

  “My treat,” he said, and reached for his wallet—then stopped.

  They both turned to look at Zack. This time Samantha didn’t say a word, just held out her hand.

  The boy shrugged sheepishly and produced Will’s wallet from his backpack. Samantha’s look when she handed it to Will told him he was right: she knew she needed to see what else was in there.