LITMIR.BIZ

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moment he was back on the Navy frigate that had failed miserably trying to tiptoe through a minefield. The impact rocked him hard, jump-started his heart.

      Samantha.

      On a violent rush of adrenaline he ran from the kitchen of the rented Naples, Florida, beach house, to the sprawling, sun-dappled room beyond, where his wife sat in a rocking chair, their five-month-old daughter, Honor, at her breast, their two-year-old son, Henry, tinkering with a building set at her feet.

      The serenity of the scene stopped him cold. Through a curtain of flaming-red hair, Samantha, esteemed ambassador to the small country of Delmonico by day and gloriously creative wife by night, looked up and smiled. “Something wrong?”

      His mouth went dry. “That’s what I was going to ask you.”

      “Is it time yet?” Little Hank, as they called him, an astonishing combination of his mother’s refined, classic beauty and his father’s rough edges, bounded to his feet and raced across the room. “You promised we could go in the ocean,” he said, sounding far older than most children his age. Enhanced genetics, they’d learned, could be passed from generation to generation. “I want you to teach me how to be a seal, like you.”

      Marcus hoisted his son into his arms, all the while his heart threatened to burst out of his chest. His son. His and Samantha’s. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe it. “Give me five, champ,” he said, ruffling the boy’s dark hair. “Why don’t you go put your trunks on.”

      The second Hank’s feet hit the sandy tile floor, he was racing toward his room in a flurry of energy that stunned even Marcus.

      Samantha shifted Honor from one breast to another. “You’ve got that look,” she observed.

      “What look?”

      Her mouth twisted into a wry smile. “The superhero look,” she said. “Like you think there’s someone you need to be saving.”

      He wanted to laugh. He tried to laugh. He knew that was the right response. But God help him, he could find no laughter, not when his pulse still pounded. A Navy SEAL, he’d learned to trust his sixth sense. Not only trust it, worship it. The tingling at the back of his neck, the churn to his gut—without these warnings Samantha would have died one horrible day three years before, and he would not be standing here staring at her in the rocking chair, with the sun streaming down on her face and his daughter suckling greedily at her breast.

      “Just a feeling,” he muttered, trying to scrape away the nasty sense of unease. His family was fine. He could see that for himself. There was no more danger stalking them. No more shadows. No more deception. That had all ended years ago, in what seemed like another lifetime.

      But the cry had been so real. So panicked and incessant. A small cry. A child’s cry.

      “Reddy?” Hank asked in his two-year-old voice, skidding into the room. He’d stripped off his tattered “Property of the United States Navy” T-shirt and pulled on a pair of khaki swim trunks. No water wings for his boy. His son had inherited his love of, comfort with, water.

      “You bet.” Already bare-chested and in trunks himself, Marcus indulged one last, lingering look at his wife and daughter. Then he grinned at his son. “Last one to the water is a rotten egg,” he taunted.

      “Hoo-wah!” Grinning, the little boy took off toward the door, threw it open and raced outside. Laughing, Marcus charged after him, into the warm breeze of a lazy, sunny Florida afternoon.

      But deep inside, the chill, the uncertainty, lingered.

      Something was wrong. Very wrong.

      The cry stopped him cold.

      Outside the temperature soared near one hundred degrees, but the chill went through Jake Ingram like a frozen knife. He held himself very still for all of one punishing heartbeat, then he ran. Through the sunny foyer of his Dallas home, up the stairs, toward the master bedroom.

      “Mariah!” Fear gripped him. Just yesterday the doctor had pronounced his wife in perfect health. Their unborn baby was thriving. Jake had seen the image on the sonogram screen, the heart beating strong, the little legs and arms wiggling. It was as though his son or daughter had been waving hello, dancing madly.

      But now Mariah was home three hours early.

      And he’d heard the cry.

      “Honey—” He stopped abruptly, stared.

      She emerged from the bathroom with her dark hair streaming down her back and a smile curving her lips. “What do you think? Do I look fat?”

      The breath left his body on a painful rush. He told himself to move, to speak, to do something, anything, but all he could do was stare at his wife, standing beneath the skylight in a skimpy red bikini, with the most beautiful pouch in the world just starting to round her belly.

      She frowned. “That bad?”

      “No.” The word almost shot out of him. And then he was across the room, tugging her into his arms, loving the feel of their child nudging against his abdomen. “You look perfect,” he murmured, burying his face in her hair and drawing in the fresh, clean scent that was Mariah. After all this time, the intensity of his love for her still staggered him. “I just…” How to explain? “I thought I heard you cry out.”

      She pulled back and gazed up at him, amusement dancing in her sharp, intelligent eyes. “I think maybe you’re taking this visualization a little too far.”

      He forced a smile. “Maybe.” From the moment they’d learned they were finally pregnant, Mariah had teased him incessantly, telling him it was time to start preparing for the sleep deprivation sure to come. She’d suggested he begin visualizing himself with a crying baby in his arms, pacing the dark halls of the house late at night.

      “How about a swim?”

      Again he let his gaze dip over his wife’s body, more lush now in her fourth month of pregnancy, more feminine. He loved being in the pool with her, slippery flesh sliding, legs twining, especially late at night when she had a fondness for skinny-dipping. “Sounds great.”

      She pushed up on her toes and brushed a kiss over his lips. “Hurry down,” she said, then swept out of the room, leaving him staring after her.

      She was fine. He’d seen that for himself. Happy. Radiant. Glowing. Nothing was wrong. There was no one or nothing sinister lurking in the shadows. Not anymore. Their lives had returned to normal. The threat to him and his brothers and sisters had long since been neutralized.

      Jake walked to the window, looked down through the thick canopies of a cluster of post oaks and saw his wife stepping into the black-bottom, lagoon-shaped pool. She dipped beneath the water, came up seconds later with her hair wet and slicked back from her face, water cascading down her body. Normally the sight fed his soul.

      But standing there in his sunny bedroom, next to the big king-size bed that his tough, gutsy, FBI-agent wife insisted upon cluttering with an array of girlie throw-pillows, he couldn’t push back the slippery edge of darkness. He’d heard the cry, damn it. He’d heard it. Loud. Panicked. Urgent. Like a summons, a plea. And deep in his gut, he knew the truth.

      Something was very wrong.

      Chapter 1

      The remnants of the cry echoed, low, soft, deceptively benign, like the distant rumble of thunder from a passing summer storm.

      Standing behind the reception desk of one of Chicago’s elite hotels, the Stirling Manor, Danielle Caldwell ignored the unsettling sensation, concentrating instead on the collection of sun-dappled roses and fragrant lilies on the reception desk. Once, she would have been urgently seeking out the source of the disturbance, crafting a way to help. Once, she would have risked everything.

      Once, she had.

      Now she hummed softly as she slid a yellow and pink-splashed rose into the vase beside the snow-white lilies. Her brother would

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