by Cindy Gerard
He didn’t know what to say. Wasn’t sure he knew what to feel. Shock. Disbelief. Sorrow.
Elation.
He hoped to hell she couldn’t see his heart jumping in his chest as he sat there. The sharp sting of alcohol leaching into the open wound in the back of his arm was the only proof that he wasn’t experiencing some kind of out-of-body experience.
Hugh’s changed … I’m not sure you’d know him anymore, much less like him … divorced … almost two years.
Yeah, the kind of work they did could change a man, could take over his soul if he wasn’t careful. But for Hugh to let himself lose a woman like Sophie? Jesus. What the hell had happened?
Still reeling, Wyatt let himself glance up at her. All he saw on her face was concentration as she worked on his arm. At least, that’s all she let him see.
“This could probably use a stitch or two,” she said, frowning, “but I think we can make do with a butterfly.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off her face. He didn’t know what he was searching for. A broken heart? Regret? Relief? Joy? Anything to give him a clue about how she felt.
He got nothing. She gave absolutely nothing away.
Divorced.
“All set.” She backed away from him. “And none too soon. I just heard the back door. That means Hope is here, probably Carmen, too. Maybe you could, um, put a fresh shirt on before they see you?” she suggested, gathering up his bloody shirt.
“Yeah. Sure,” he mumbled absently. Like an automaton, he stood and squeezed past her and out of the small bathroom. He walked across the hall to the bedroom where he’d stashed his go bag, closed the door behind him, and leaned heavily against it.
“Jesus.” He scrubbed the heel of his hand over his bare chest.
Sophie was single.
Which meant … hell, he didn’t know what it meant. For the time being, he didn’t need to know, he reminded himself, pushing away from the door in self-disgust. He didn’t need to think about it. Couldn’t think straight about it if he tried.
The clock was ticking. A child’s life was at stake, and for the moment, the best hope that child had of coming home alive was him.
He unzipped his bag and rummaged around inside. He finally came up with a clean white T-shirt and dragged it over his head. Then he drew a bracing breath, swung open the bedroom door … and found himself staring down into the upturned face of a wide-eyed El Salvadoran girl.
“Buenas tardes, señorita,” he said when it was clear that he’d scared her half to death.
She was a beautiful girl. Huge black eyes, long dark brown hair, lithe and slim, with toasted-caramel skin. He wasn’t good at ages, but if he had to guess, he’d put her somewhere between ten and twelve. Sophie hadn’t mentioned that Lola had a sister, but he couldn’t help but wonder if this, too, was Ramona’s child. Or possibly her neighbor Carmen’s granddaughter.
He extended his hand. “Me llama Wyatt.”
“Sí.” She hesitated, but when he smiled at her, she laid her hand in his. “Sé quien es.”
So she knew who he was. And she was still a little afraid. He didn’t blame her. His big mitt looked like a bear paw next to her delicate little hand.
“That’s a very pretty necklace,” he said, commenting on the heart-shaped disc that dangled from a delicate chain. There was something engraved on the silver, but the letters were so small he couldn’t make them out.
When he didn’t get any response from her, he tried again, in Spanish this time.
“όmo te llama?” he asked hoping she’d feel comfortable enough to tell him her name.
Footsteps on the tile brought his head up to see Sophie walking toward them.
“Hope,” Sophie said, her gaze riveted on the girl, her expression full of warmth and what could only be love as she looked from the child to him. “Her name is Hope. She’s my daughter.”
He cut his gaze from Sophie to the lovely Latino girl, unable to hide his surprise. It had never occurred to him that Sophie and Hugh would have adopted a child, yet it so fit what he knew of Sophie. Her heart had always been kind and generous and open, and the proof that she hadn’t changed was right here in front of him. He slowly absorbed the shock waves of yet one more bombshell.
Before he’d fully digested this latest bit of information, she hit him with one more explosive blast.
“Wyatt,” she said so quietly that he understood something had happened.
He met her worried eyes.
“We just got a ransom demand.”
A few minutes later, Sophie joined Wyatt at the island separating the kitchen from the living area, where he was studying the ransom note and working on a mug of coffee. She glanced into the living room. Hope sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, watching a Hannah Montana episode dubbed in Spanish. Only Hope wasn’t really watching it. Her daughter had withdrawn into herself. Even though Sophie understood that it was Hope’s subconscious attempt to escape the horrible reality of Lola’s abduction, it was still difficult to watch.
Just as the ransom note had been difficult to read. It had been mixed in with the bills, unsolicited advertisements, and Sophie’s morning paper. The plain white envelope appeared as innocuous as a greeting card. There was nothing innocent, however, about the contents. Handwritten in Spanish, it advised Sophie that if she wanted to see her daughter alive again, she was to pay $500,000 in unmarked American bills by noon on Thursday. At that time, she would receive a call with instructions on where and exactly when the exchange would be made.
She felt sick. She didn’t have half a million dollars.
“It’s significant that they’re giving you three days to get the money.”
Her head snapped at the sound of Wyatt’s voice. “I’m sorry.” She turned to him, knew he’d said something important. Knew that she wasn’t tracking on all fronts. “What did you say?”
He studied her with concern. “Maybe you should get some rest, sugar.”
“No. No, I’m fine. It’s … it’s just a little difficult to concentrate.”
His frown deepened, but he didn’t press her. “I said it’s significant that they’re giving you three days to get the money. And it’s going to help that our window of time just expanded by”—he checked his watch, did a mental calculation—“seventy-six hours,” he said. “Good news for us.”
Good news for them but bad news for a terrified child who wanted to come home.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Lola and her mother, Ramona. Overcome with grief and worry, Ramona had allowed her brother to take her home with him to her parents yesterday. Sophie couldn’t get Ramona’s face out of her mind. The young woman had aged years in a matter of hours.
“Why is it significant that they’re giving me three days?” she asked, her soft tone matching Wyatt’s so Hope couldn’t hear them.
“It means they know you’ll have to go to an outside source for the money, which means that whoever is behind this knows enough about you to realize you won’t have the cash.”
“Yet they don’t know enough to take the right child.” She stopped when she realized what she’d said. “Oh, God. Right child? There is no right child. There is no—”
“Sophie.” Wyatt covered her shaking hand with his. “We deal with what is, sugar, not what should or shouldn’t be. Keep it together, okay? You need to keep it together.”
He was right. She drew a bracing breath, knew she had to do something or she’d implode. Wyatt had already been busy, making calls and talking to the men he worked with in Argentina who were due to arrive later today.
So she rose and walked to the refrigerator then busied herself preparing lunch. She stuffed thick tortillas with beans and cheese and chicken and tried not to let the fear take over.
“Pupusas,” she explained, sliding a plate in front of Wyatt as she joined him at the island.
“Where’s yours?”
She shook her head. The thought of food nauseated her. “I can’t eat.”
&nb
sp; “Not an option.” He reached for a knife from the thick wooden block at the far end of the black granite counter and cut his pupusas in half. “You need the protein.”
“What I need is to get Lola back. What I need is for my daughter to feel safe. Look at her. She’s hardly talked since this happened. Some bastard from the police department interrogated her and scared her to death. He even threatened her when she couldn’t remember anything. Now I can’t get her to eat, and I don’t think she slept at all last night. She just stares. She doesn’t even cry.”
“She’ll be okay,” Wyatt assured her. “She’s a kid. She’s tough. She’ll eventually remember something that will help us. With you in her corner, she will absolutely recover. In time. But right now, you need to set an example for her, darlin’. She’s taking her cues from you. Now, eat.”
He was right again, Sophie admitted, and forced herself to take a bite of the pupusas. “I feel so helpless.”
“We’re going to get Lola back,” Wyatt insisted in that quiet, confident way he had.
“I want to believe you. God, I want to believe, but these monsters, whoever they are … there’s no guarantee they won’t kill her even if we do come up with the money, right? Wyatt, things go wrong. Victims get killed.” She hugged herself to stall the chills that even the summer heat couldn’t ward off.
“We’ll get her back,” he repeated.
She met his eyes and nodded, mostly because she knew he wanted her to. She glanced across the room at Hope, so quiet in front of the TV. “What happens when they figure out they don’t have Hope?” She kept her voice low so Hope couldn’t hear her. “The paper covered the story. There was no way to keep it under wraps. Not with so many witnesses.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, matching her tone. “You should call the newspaper today. Maybe even the local TV news. Let them know that Lola is like a daughter to you, that you’ll do anything to get her back unharmed. If the kidnappers understand that she’s valuable to you, she’ll remain valuable to them.”
It made sense. Lola’s abduction hadn’t been front-page news—a sad commentary that another run-of-the-mill abduction wasn’t worthy of the front page—but the media had been covering it.
A horrifying thought kept assaulting her. She couldn’t keep it bottled up any longer. She glanced at Hope again, then back to Wyatt. “What if they come back for Hope?”
He gave her a hard look, and she knew she wasn’t going to like what he had to say. “There’s no way to soft-pedal this. It’s a real possibility that they’ll try. We need to get her out of El Salvador, Sophie. Tuck her away someplace safe where no one can get to her.”
Sophie clamped her hands together in front of her on the counter. She stared at her mostly untouched pupusas. She knew he was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to think about. “Where? Where can she go? I can’t send her to my parents. I can’t put them in the middle of this.”
“I agree,” he said. “I know a place where she’ll be safe.” He covered her hands and squeezed gently when her wary gaze shot to his. “You called me because you trust me,” he added when tears threatened. “Trust me now.”
Sophie looked at her vibrant daughter, who now possessed all the life of a statue. “She’s so fragile.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “She is.”
She met Wyatt’s eyes again, saw the calm assurance there.
“ Trust me now ,” he said again.
Trust him with the one thing she loved above all else in the world.
She closed her eyes and nodded. Then she prayed to God that her instincts were right.
Argentina. Wyatt wanted to send Hope to Argentina to stay with his friend Dr. Juliana Flores, and his boss, Nate Black, who would protect her. The idea flew in the face of every maternal instinct Sophie possessed. And yet what choice did she have?
She asked Carmen to take Hope with her for a little while. Then she called the newspapers and the TV station and asked them to spread the word that she considered Lola a daughter and would do anything to get her back. Now Wyatt was trying to reassure her that Hope would be fine. With strangers. Strangers to her, at any rate. But he’d asked her to trust him. And trust, after all, was the reason she’d called him in the first place.
“Tell me about Dr. Flores.” She sat down on one end of the sofa. The thought of being separated from Hope, especially while she was so traumatized, broke her heart.
Wyatt eased down next to her. “Where do I start? Juliana is an amazing woman. She’s a doctor, as you already know. In addition to her private practice, she runs a free clinic in Bahía Blanca that she and her husband, Armando, started together. Sadly, several years ago, Juliana lost both Armando and their daughter, Angelina.”
“How horrible.” She felt a deep, heart-wrenching pain for Dr. Flores. “What happened?”
Sophie read hesitation in Wyatt’s eyes before he finally spoke. “The world is full of bad men, Sophie. Unfortunately even people as philanthropic and gentle as Juliana can’t always escape the violence. Let’s leave it at that.”
Because the details are too horrifying, she surmised with a sick, sinking feeling in her stomach .
She shot up off the sofa, overcome by anger and fear and grief for a woman and a family she didn’t even know but whose circumstances meshed with her own horrific situation. And she felt helpless and overwhelmed by the odds of getting Lola back alive.
“God, I hate this. I don’t want this to be happening. I don’t want—”
Wyatt walked up behind her; his big hands gripped her shoulders, steadying her.
“I’m sorry.” She wiped at a tear, then bolstered herself with a deep breath. She was doing no one—especially Lola—any good by walking that road.
“The situation is what it is,” she said with a weary acceptance. “It didn’t start in my lifetime. It won’t end in it, either. Even knowing what Hugh and his men, what you and your team, do every day, I just never expected such evil to come so close.”
She turned around and faced him then. Saw the compassion and the understanding in his eyes and forced herself to smile. “And I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. Thank you for keeping my daughter safe.”
“I want you to go with her, Sophie,” he said after a long moment.
The sad and sorry truth was that she wanted that, too. It didn’t make her proud, but she wanted to be with her daughter, leave the fight to Wyatt and his men, bury her head in the sand, and not pull it out until she was sure of a happy ending. But that was the coward’s way. She would not let this turn her into someone she couldn’t bear to be.
“I’m staying here,” she said. “I need to do what I can to help you. And I can help you.”
“You’re not responsible for Lola’s abduction,” he said, reading her thoughts to the letter. “You can’t carry that guilt.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not turning my back on her. Besides, the kidnappers have to know I got the note. They’ll expect to deal with me.”
When he opened his mouth to object, she cut off his protest with a hard shake of her head. “What if it is the Guerrilleros Nacionales? Then it is all on me. How many more of my students could be snatched if I were to leave?” she pointed out, trying another tack. “If I hide out and do nothing, I might not even have a school to come back to. The public outcry could close me down. This is about one lost child, yes, and if it is the GN, then it’s also about hundreds of children who won’t have a chance without my school.
“And if it’s not the GN,” she added, “it’s still up to me to help find her.”
Wyatt’s continued look of skepticism prompted her final and strongest argument. “It was supposed to be my daughter. My daughter. Ramona and her family are grieving instead. You can’t expect me to do nothing.”
He searched her face, then turned and walked to the French doors leading out to the patio. He stood there, staring outside for the longest moment before turning back to her.
“All right.”
The hard look on his face showed his reluctance. “But no heroics. You will not go out on your own. You will—”
“Find her,” she cut in. “You and I will find her. We have to find her. Alive,” she insisted, swallowing hard. “There’s no other acceptable outcome.”
7
“How the hell could you fuck it up? Your bungling flunkies grabbed the wrong kid.”
Vincente Bonilla held the cell phone loosely to his ear, choosing to extend benevolence toward the man screaming at him on the other end of the line. “You are lucky I’m in a forgiving mood, my friend, or you would die a slow and painful death for speaking to me this way.”
Blame his good mood on the ganja. And the whore, Justina, on her knees between his legs.
And then there was the prospect of the money this latest venture—wrong girl or not—would net both him and his pissed-off silent partner.
Not too silent now.
“You watch TV. You see the news,” Vincente stated. “The woman says she will still pay. No harm. No foul.” Well, except for Joma. Sadly, mistakes like the one Joma made when he’d pinched the wrong kid could not go unpunished. Not if Vincente was to keep face with his soldiers as well as keep them in line. No, he could not be perceived as soft.
He would miss Joma, though. The boy had made him laugh. Now Joma made his mother cry, for her son, who was dead. But then, the crack whore always cried. Why should today be different?
“We proceed as planned.” Vincente flipped the cell phone closed and tossed it onto the sofa cushion beside him. End of discussion. Although he had seen firsthand the brutality the man was capable of inflicting, he grew weary listening to his threats. Vincente could be every bit as vicious. And Vincente Bonilla was afraid of no man.
He drew deeply on the slow-burning joint, held it in his lungs, savored, and sank deeper into the plush leather sofa.
“Is good, my little puta,” he murmured tenderly, petting Justina’s hair as she worked him with her studded tongue—just the way he liked it—and rode on the sensations of her greedy little mouth.