LITMIR.BIZ

      EMMA HELD HER tongue as she waited for a response. She could practically see the wheels turning in Sawyer’s head, adding up time, weeks, months. She ground her teeth against the need for an explanation. She hadn’t been with anyone else since Sawyer. He’d barely left the States before she knew she was pregnant. If Henry’s perfect olive skin and pale blue eyes weren’t enough proof, then maybe Sawyer should look in a mirror.

      “Mine?” His gaze jumped continually between her face and Henry’s.

      “Yes.” She moved past him toward the hallway. “I need to sit down. You probably should too.”

      She led Sawyer back into the living room, giving a wide berth to the freshly bleached floorboards where Sara’s blood had been spilled. She took a seat on the chair farthest from the couch where the monster had pinned her sister. It took effort to force the still-raw images from her mind.

      Sawyer squatted on the floor in front of her chair, jeans pulled tight against his strong thighs, big hands dangling between his knees as he balanced, a look of shock and confusion etched on his brow. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

      Emma pursed her lips, culling the desire to scream. “I tried.” She made each word stand on its own, tempted to recite all the one-sided arguments she’d practiced to perfection in the shower all these months since his “eight week” mission ended.

      “I got a message from you,” he said. “Did you know you were pregnant when you left the voice mail?”

      The accusation in his tone ignited a fire in her belly. “That was why I called. I’d just confirmed with my doctor, and I was happy,” she snapped.

      “Then why didn’t you tell me? Why would you keep something like this from me? I’m a father, Emma. A father and I had no idea.”

      “You could have returned my call,” she said.

      “You could’ve told me in the voice mail.”

      “I didn’t want to tell you something this important in a voice mail. I wanted to tell you in person, and you were supposed to be home in two more weeks, and I spent every one of those last fourteen days deciding how I’d deliver the surprise. Maybe with some cutesy sign or a little custom-made onesie.” She shook her head. “I can see it was stupid of me now, but I was thrilled to be having your baby, and you had your phone number changed.”

      “I didn’t have my number changed.” Sawyer ground the words through clenched teeth.

      “Disconnected then,” she conceded, “without the courtesy of letting me know first. You made it clear you didn’t want to hear from me again, and you didn’t want to call me either, or you would have.”

      “That isn’t what happened.”

      Emma squinted her eyes, wishing she could scream and yell and lose control, but she refused to frighten Henry or give Sawyer the satisfaction of seeing her so rattled. Instead, she said, “I called your number every month after my prenatal appointment, and I listened to the notification that your number had been disconnected. I forced myself to remember you were done with me, even if my heart wasn’t done with you, and you have no idea what that was like for me.”

      His frustrated expression fell slowly into a grimace. “I wasn’t home when you left that voice mail. I didn’t even get it until last month.”

      “Then you should have called last month.”

      “How could I have known this?” he asked, extending a hand toward the baby in her arms. “It’s been more than a year since we’ve spoken. I assumed you’d moved on.”

      Her eyebrows shot up. “I did. I’m fine. We’re fine,” she said, casting a gaze at her son. “I had to get my act together, with or without you, and I had to find peace for Henry’s sake. So I stopped calling you, and I let us go.”

      He fixed a heated gaze on her, his face wrought with emotion. Hurt, frustration, regret. “What would’ve happened if Sara hadn’t been taken today?” he asked. “I would’ve just gone on with my life having no idea I was a father?”

      Emma glared back, wind sucked from her chest. She wanted to shove him hard and knock him onto his backside, but there wasn’t time for that. “We can fight about this later. Right now I need to figure out what happened to Sara,” she said. “I found a notebook full of numbers hidden in her room. Will you look at it for me and see if it makes any sense to you?”

      “How old is he?” Sawyer asked, unmoved by her change of subject. His gaze was locked on Henry. “When was he born? What did he weigh?”

      Emma steadied her nerves and wet her lips. Those were fair enough questions. “His name is Henry Sawyer Hart. He’s four months old, born June 8 at 8:17 a.m. He weighed eight pounds, eleven ounces. He was twenty-one inches long.”

      “You gave him my name.”

      “Middle name. It seemed like the right thing to do.”

      Sawyer pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and dug them in.

      “Why didn’t you call?” she asked again, needing to know once and for all what had happened between their last passionate night of love declarations and the dead silence that began afterward and never ended.

      Sawyer dropped his hands from his eyes. He stretched onto his feet and braced broad hands over narrow hips. Warning flared in his eyes. There was a debate going on in that head of his, but his lips were sealed tight.

      Maybe he didn’t have a reason. Maybe he didn’t want to admit their time together had been nothing more than a fling. Not real to him like it had been to her. It was easy to see he wasn’t the same guy she’d fallen in love with. The man before her was hard and distant. Not the man who’d swept her into his arms and twirled her until she was breathless with laughter.

      Maybe that guy had never been real.

      Emma’s throat tightened as the look on his face grew pained. “Never mind. You don’t owe me an explanation.” She lifted Sara’s notebook from the end table beside her and extended it to Sawyer. “Here. Let’s just move on. Maybe there’s something in there that will help the police figure out who took her and why. She’s been gone twenty-four hours already, and our odds of finding her diminish significantly after seventy-two.”

      Sawyer caught the narrow book in his fingertips and held her gaze. “My team and I were captured. They were killed.”

      Emma’s mouth fell open. “What?”

      “They died. I didn’t. I’ve only been home a few weeks. My cell service plan wasn’t renewed on time because I wasn’t home, so it was canceled. I didn’t change the number or disconnect the phone. I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was trying to survive, and I don’t want to talk about what happened.”

      She worked her mouth shut. Her own harsh words crashed back to mind like a ton of bricks. She’d blamed him for not returning her calls without bothering to ask why he hadn’t. She’d assumed the worst, that he’d avoided her intentionally, played her for a fool, never realizing that him avoiding her was hardly the worst thing that could have happened. Her gaze snapped back to the scars. Thick, raised marks across his skin that weren’t there a year ago. On his neck and arms. What looked like the results of a serious burn above his left eye. “Sawyer.”

      He lifted a palm. “Don’t.”

      Emma cradled Henry tighter, comforting the one piece of Sawyer that would allow it. She’d heard stories, saw movies and read books about men who’d been through similar things, losing their teams, being held against their wills. There was a common thread to every man’s story. Their experiences had wrecked

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