LITMIR.BIZ

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promised, “You let me go right now and that’s what I’ll tell everyone.”

      She didn’t really care about punishing the older couple—whom she suspected were retired military—for helping the Ranger. And if her suspicions about Garrett Smith proved true and Rafe learned of them, Lyons would probably kill his brother-in-law with his bare hands.

      Ignoring her offer, Rafe said, “It’s just about eight-thirty. We should make the motel anytime now. Then we’d better grab some dinner. You must be hun—”

      Eight-thirty? Her head spun as she considered the sheer number of lost hours, underscored by the fading summer sky and the dim silhouettes of trees along the roadside. Heart rate ratcheting skyward, she demanded once more, “Where have you taken me?”

      In the more than twelve hours since her capture, they could have crossed state lines twice or even three times. Though she knew they’d made at least one stop, she had no idea how long they had stayed off the roads—or how they could have possibly avoided what must have been a massive law enforcement effort to locate and rescue her.

      In the distance she saw lights, the dark towers of buildings stacked before a gray-blue blur. The ocean? Gulf? Could this mean they were still somewhere in Florida?

      “Little beach community, not too far from Palm Beach,” he said, confirming her suspicion. “Think of this as a vacation.”

      “Real funny,” she shot back. “And here I’d pegged you for a cowboy, not a clown.”

      “I’m neither,” Rafe said roughly. “Just a man looking to find out what happened to the only blood family he has left on this planet—and why someone would butcher my little sister like she was nothing. No one.”

      Empathy stirred Shannon’s heart as she heard the desperate grief behind his anger. Enough grief and desperation to throw away his career, his very freedom, to save his sister’s child.

      “You could drop this right now,” Shannon said. “Before somebody really gets hurt. People—even your superiors—aren’t without compassion for your situation, and you can bet the FBI and more local agencies than you can shake a stick at are all committed to the search for your niece and your sister’s killers. If you’ll let me, Lyons—Rafe— I could get you a good deal, maybe even keep you out of prison so you can see that baby when we find her. Be the kind of uncle she can count on to help raise her.”

      If we find her alive. Though the pair believed to have murdered Lissa Smith was suspected in other similar crimes, none of the missing babies had ever been recovered, and the purpose of their abduction remained a mystery. Black-market trafficking? Blood rituals? The possibilities were endless, each one more sickening than the last.

      “Listen to her, Rafe,” Garrett urged, a note of pleading in his voice. “It can’t hurt to listen to what she says.”

      The vehicle, which she’d decided was a midsize SUV of some sort, slowed to make a left turn beside a faded sign that read The Seashell Motel—Your Home Away from Home Since 1957. Behind it lay a long one-story structure, a single bar of back-to-back rooms squatting on the far side of a tiny, ill-lit pool. A very few vehicles, all of them older models, offered evidence that this mom-and-pop enterprise was barely clinging to life—a far cry from the luxury hotels she would have expected in this area.

      “I have no intention of listening to a word of Agent Brandt’s deal,” Rafe said firmly, clearly used to pulling rank on others. “I brought her here for one reason and one reason only. To talk her into mine.”

      “What about your career?” According to Shannon’s research, the thirty-two-year-old had little else. No steady girlfriend, no other family, and few friends beyond the members of his tight-knit Ranger unit, which had its home base in Georgia. Other than the accent, he’d left behind his West Texas past, including the rodeo bull riding circuit, where he’d competed in his youth.

      He was one cowboy who’d traded in his hat—along with his heart and soul and loyalty—for a U.S. Army Ranger beret and the unique camaraderie of Special Operations.

      Desperate to leverage that bond, she added, “Those Rangers—they’re your family, too, right? You’re just going to bail on them in wartime?”

      His green eyes glared back at her. “You’d better think about your own career, sugar. Because from what I’ve learned about that hostage standoff back in Iowa, you’re about one screwup short of being booted from the only job that’s ever mattered to you…Daddy’s girl.”

      She blinked back angry tears that she would never dare shed. They blurred Lyons’s outline, smudging his dark navy T-shirt and the hard planes of his face.

      “Go straight to hell,” she murmured, her sympathy for his motives vaporizing in the white heat of her reaction to his cruelty.

      SHANNON WAS STILL SEETHING when Rafe finally ordered her into the room. Garrett had checked them into an end unit, a room decorated with cheesy paintings of the beach and a peeling seashell wallpaper border, though any view of the Atlantic had long since been obstructed by the newer oceanfront hotels.

      “I’m headed out to pick up dinner,” Garrett told them. “Anything you two want?”

      Shannon thrust her shackled wrists toward his face. “How ’bout something with a file baked inside it? Or better yet, a working cell phone?”

      Rafe shot her an annoyed look from where he was unplugging the second of two grimy-looking rotary phones. “Lock these in the Jeep, will you, Garrett? No need to tempt the agent. And as far as food, it’s just fuel, that’s all. So pick whatever you like.”

      Garrett pulled off his beach hat and raked his fingers through limp, sandy-blond hair. About five-ten and still a little on the pale side, he was nonetheless a decent-looking specimen. Squeamish, though, in contrast to the Ranger. Regardless of her suspicions, Shannon tried to appeal to his softer nature.

      “I could really use some aspirin or something, anything extra-strength to help knock back this headache.” Though that was true enough, she feigned exhaustion as she dropped into one of the old oak chairs and put her feet up on one of two sagging full-sized beds. “And maybe…if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, a box of tampons—super plus?”

      That part was pure fiction, but she had never met the man who would dare to call a woman on the bluff.

      “Um…” Garrett’s gray-eyed gaze slid toward Rafe, as if for help. When none was forthcoming, he finally shrugged and murmured, “Sure, I guess so,” before slinking out to escape while he could.

      “You’re good. I’ll give you that,” Rafe allowed as he stepped up to the door and hooked the security chain. “But don’t count on playing on his sympathies and turning him against me.”

      Stalking back to where she sat, he looked like a mountain of pure, male muscle—six feet three inches, and two-hundred-ten pounds’ worth, according to his records.

      Refusing to be intimidated, Shannon fixed him with a fierce look, daring him to come one step nearer. “And don’t count on getting my help by throwing my past up in my face. You don’t win friends with bludgeons—or is brute force all they taught you back in Ranger school?”

      He grimaced, and a long sigh followed. “Sorry, Agent. I know better. But that shot about me abandoning my men in wartime—that was way over the line. They’re family, too, to me.”

      “Then let’s agree. Family’s off-limits. Especially mine.” And most especially the father she had lost at age eight, the father she and her brother had both been raised to revere, with his every artifact an idol in their rancher uncle’s house. Her stomach shrank down to a red-hot coal as Rafe’s Daddy’s girl crack echoed through her memory.

      “Got it.” He stuck out his right hand, offering to shake.

      Ignoring it, she added, “And if you ever dare to bring up Iowa again, I swear to you that one way or another, I will find a way to burn you. You can count on it.”

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