Mission: Cavanaugh Baby (20 page)

Ashley laughed shortly. There was no sense in going there. She had to deal with reality, with the hand she was dealt, not with some wistful pipe dreams. “I can’t exactly advertise for a fiancé now, can I?”

“No, I wouldn’t advise it,” Shane agreed. “But that wasn’t what I was saying.”

What were you saying?
Ashley couldn’t help wondering. “What? You’re telling me that you know where I can find a fiancé lying around somewhere?”

He squeaked through a light a second before it turned from a forgiving yellow to a forbidding red. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

Why was he doing this to her? Did he think she’d find it funny? She was serious about adopting that little human being and, in an ideal world, he would be the man at her side.

But
nothing
had ever been ideal for her, and there was no reason for her to believe that it would start now. The man had utterly rocked her world the other night, but she was a big girl and she knew that people like her didn’t get lucky like that very often.

“Yeah, right,” she said mockingly. “Who?”

“Me,” he told her simply.

Now that was downright cruel, she thought. Did he suspect how she felt about him? Was this his way of driving her away, by poking fun at her? “Very funny,” she answered coolly.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.” His voice was so serious, she stared at him, waiting for that shoe to fall, the laughter to begin. How far was he going to carry this joke?

What if it’s not a joke?
a little voice whispered in her head.
What if he’s serious?

The next moment, he said as much.

“I was trying to be serious. I
am
serious. You’re the kind of woman I’ve been looking for, Ashley,” he said. Then, because a man couldn’t bare his soul to the woman he loved while driving, Shane pulled over to the first empty parking area he saw, turned off the engine and then turned in his seat to look at her. “A woman who can be a partner,” he continued as if there’d been no pause at all, “who won’t ask me to give up something I feel defines me as a person.”

Her mouth was dry, and she could feel herself trembling inside. “You can’t be serious,” Ashley insisted. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know enough,” he answered. And as far as he was concerned, he did. There was something about her that spoke to him, that reached him in the furthest recesses of his soul. “But if you feel you want to further enlighten me, go ahead.”

There wasn’t a single drop of moisture in her mouth. The words felt as if they were choking her as she pushed them out. “I had a baby.”

He’d already gotten that impression by what she’d said to Tessie when she was attempting to calm her, but since she didn’t actually mention one and there were no photographs of a child in her house, he had the feeling that this part of the story didn’t have a happy outcome. He was waiting for her to say something in her own time. He’d never believed in pushing an issue.

“Go on,” he coaxed quietly.

She stared straight ahead. “My baby was stillborn. The father had long since been out of the picture. It took me a while to get my head back together.” She looked at Shane now, waiting for him to comment. When he didn’t, she asked, “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?”

He hadn’t wanted to interrupt her or to say anything until she was finished. “I’m sorry.”

She waited for more. There wasn’t any. “That’s all?” she asked incredulously.

“I wish I had been there for you,” he added.

That wasn’t what she meant. She thought there’d be accusations of secrecy, or that he would use it as an excuse to withdraw the emotional support she felt coming from him.

“You’re not surprised I kept that from you?”

He shook his head. “It’s not exactly something someone can fill in on a résumé,” he answered. “Your past is your business. If you don’t want to talk about it, I’m okay with that. It’s your future that’s my business, not your past. Now, getting back to my proposal,” he said glibly. “I don’t expect an answer from you right away, but the offer
is
on the table. I love you, and I’d like the chance to make up for the lousy hand that life dealt you prior to this.”

She stared at him, wondering when she’d begun to hallucinate. But he was still there, waiting for her to say something. “You’re serious.”

He thought they’d resolved this already. Apparently not. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

For a very simple reason. “Because good things don’t happen to me.”

“That was the old you,” Shane said, dismissing that persona. “Good things do happen to the new you.”

Ashley was still unconvinced. “I don’t want your pity,” she insisted.

“But I want yours.”

Okay, now he wasn’t making
any
sense. “What?”

“I want you to take pity on me,” he said, spelling it out for her. “I don’t think I could handle being rejected. I went through it once, and it took me a while to glue together what was left of my tattered self-esteem,” he told her in all seriousness. “If you reject me, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to recover.”

Pausing for a moment, he went for broke.

“I had a feeling about you when I first met you.”

She remembered every detail, every look that had passed across his face. “Yeah, you thought I was a pain in the butt.”

“And I wasn’t wrong, you are,” he replied matter-of-factly. Then, before she could say anything in response, he told her, “But I also had a feeling that we belonged together. That the sum of us together is even greater—even
better
—than the parts.”

He was serious. He was really serious. Oh, wow, she thought, too overwhelmed to speak for a moment. And then she did, proceeding cautiously.

“All right, we’ll get engaged,” she told him, not letting on just how hard her heart was pounding right at this moment. “And I’ll give you six months to come to your senses.”

“What happens after six months?” he asked, watching her expression.

She chose her words very, very carefully. “If you’re still willing to tie yourself down to me after six months, then it’s okay with me,” she told him, trying her best not to sound breathless. “We’ll get married.”

“Is there a fast-forward button on this thing, by any chance?” he asked. “A way to turn six months into six minutes, something like that?” A trace of his impatience rose to the surface.

“I’m afraid that would defeat the purpose.”
Of you coming to your senses,
Ashley concluded silently.

“Okay, then we’ll do it your way. We’ll be engaged for six months. They’ll be six of the longest months of my life,” he added. “But if that’s what’ll make you happy, I can stick it out.” His expression remained serious as his eyes searched her face. “But I get to kiss you during those six months, right?”

Now it was getting decidedly hard for
her
to maintain a serious expression, as well, especially since the way Shane was looking at her was making her feel exceedingly warm, not to mention aroused.

The word almost stuck to her throat, but she finally managed to get it out. “Right.”

“Good.” He made no attempt to start the car again. “I sure hope you bought stock in ChapStick ’cause you’re going to be using a lot of it,” he told her just before he showed her why.

Five minutes later, as he stopped for a breather, she murmured, “Maybe we’ll make that three months.” She felt rather than heard him laugh.

“Sounds good to me,” he responded just before he kissed her again.

Shane fully intended to pare the months down to zero.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from
The Missing Colton
by Loreth Anne White.

We hope you enjoyed this Harlequin Romantic Suspense title.

You want sparks to fly!
Harlequin Romantic Suspense
stories deliver, with strong and adventurous women, brave and powerful men and the life-and-death situations that bring them together.

Enjoy four new stories from Harlequin Romantic Suspense every month!

Visit
Harlequin.com
to find your next great read.

We like you—why not like us on Facebook:
Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks

Follow us on Twitter:
Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks

Read our blog for all the latest news on our authors and books:
HarlequinBlog.com

Subscribe to our newsletter for special offers, new releases, and more!

Harlequin.com/newsletters

Chapter 1

C
louds of dust swirled down Dead River’s main street as the small Wyoming town hunkered against the early fall winds sweeping across this vast, drought-ravaged region of cattle-ranch country. A wet front had helped quell the wildfires and brought a dusting of snow to the distant Laramie peaks. But rain had done little to quench the parched ranchlands, and the wind easily cast exposed topsoil adrift.

Jagger McKnight blinked against the blowing grit as he pushed open the door of the Dead River Diner. He was greeted by a blast of warm air and the smell of fried food—yet another greasy spoon, like so many he’d frequented over the past twelve months as he’d drifted aimlessly across the United States. But it was almost 6:00 p.m.—he was cold and famished. He also had questions. A local diner was as good a place as any to start.

Choosing the empty booth closest to the door, Jagger hefted his kit bag onto the red vinyl seat and scooted it toward the grime-streaked window. He removed his jacket, then his cowboy hat. But as his fingers brushed against the ragged scar under his hairline, Jagger stilled, instantly disoriented. A soft panic began to lick through his stomach.

No. Not now...

He concentrated on breathing in slowly and folded his tall frame into the booth beside his gear. Pressing both hands down hard on the table, Jagger focused on the view of the parking lot outside the dirty window. He mentally cataloged what he saw—the gusts of sand piling into soft yellow drifts against a wall. The cracked wall, peeling plaster.
Like the bunker.

Tongues of panic licked again, a little deeper, faster. And for a white-hot instant he could no longer see the parking lot. He was back. Trapped. Golangal Valley. A desert windstorm, the sound of blowing Afghan sand like screaming banshees as it funneled through rocks. They were surrounded by heavily armed insurgents in the hills. An invisible enemy. Dark was coming.

A pot banged suddenly in the diner kitchen and Jagger jumped, his pulse spiking as his brain scrambled to translate the noise into mortar fire, explosions.

Enough! You can stop this...

He turned his concentration back to the present, to the two Harleys parked out front of the diner. Across the parking lot, two eighteen-wheeler semis were angled for an easy exit. On the opposite side of the street, a young woman pushed a covered stroller as she bent into the wind, a scarf protecting her face. Civilian. Semis. Harleys.

No grenades hidden in scarves, or the folds of a burka or clutched in the small brown hands of a liquid-eyed child. No tanks. No guerillas around the side of the wall. If Jagger wanted, he could simply stand up, step out the diner door, hit the road. He was free. Free to go.

A tumbleweed bounced past the semis, driven by the vagaries of wind, en route to nowhere in particular. Just like he’d been—drifting. Seeking to numb his nightmares with too many beers, too many late nights, too many one-night stands with women whose names he couldn’t even begin to remember. A shrink would have a field day with him, but Jagger had walked away from all that medical crap. He
had
to do this himself.

And now, at least, he had a small hook on which to hang a future, however tenuous.

It had come to him Tuesday night, almost nine weeks ago—something to grab on to, something he could use to claw back a semblance of his life, and he’d grabbed it like a lifeline.

Maybe the timing had just been right. Maybe it was destiny. Maybe blind folly or sheer desperation. Hell knew. But on that Tuesday night, Jagger had been nursing a warm beer in a dive bar on the outskirts of Casper in east-central Wyoming when a breaking CNN news story on the TV behind the counter had riveted him to his stool.

It was a piece about a kidnapping—a three-month-old baby girl named Cheyenne Colton had been snatched right out of her crib in her family’s mansion on Dead River Ranch about forty miles northwest of Cheyenne. The child’s governess had been shot dead in the process. The CNN reporter had noted similarities between this kidnapping and another thirty years earlier, when a baby boy, Cole Colton, had been abducted from the very same mansion at around the same age.

A few weeks later, the TV news reported that baby Cheyenne had been located unharmed. Baby Cole, however, had never been found. The infant was presumed dead, all leads in that case long gone stone cold.

The story had rattled Jagger. Thirty years ago, also at three months old, he himself had been abducted in a carjacking gone terribly wrong. He’d been raised by one of the kidnappers under a false identity until his real family had finally found him shortly after his ninth birthday.

Was it possible that Cole Colton could still be alive, raised under a false name, never knowing where he’d come from?

Jagger’s family had never stopped searching for him, had never once allowed themselves to presume their son had died. Why had Cole’s family given up? Cole’s father, according to the news, was Jethro Colton, a billionaire rancher from Wyoming. He certainly had the financial means for a protracted search. And why had there never been a ransom note?

The reporter in Jagger had latched on to these questions with a desperation he didn’t like to acknowledge in himself, but deep down he knew that in the unsolved mystery of Cole Colton he’d finally seen a glimmer of something that he could focus on. If he could get to the bottom of that thirty-year-old mystery, and find out what happened to that baby boy, it could be his absolution, his way back into mainstream society, back into a journalistic career he’d all but forsaken.

Jagger had bought a small laptop in Casper, and a cell phone, and he’d begun to research the Colton family, focusing first on the billionaire patriarch himself, Jethro Colton. It didn’t take Jagger long to discover Jethro had once been a petty criminal who’d done time for robbery. This had piqued Jagger’s news instincts further. He’d begun to slow down on the beer, started getting better sleep and sworn off sex with nameless women.

Jagger learned that after being released from Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution just over thirty years ago, Jethro Colton had mysteriously come into some big money. He’d used it to buy Dead River Ranch—almost two thousand acres of cattle country in the Laramie foothills—where he’d fashioned himself into one of the most notorious, ruthless and prosperous cattlemen in Wyoming.
Forbes
magazine had not long ago run a feature on him, dubbing him Wyoming’s Billionaire Rancher.

However, there was a dark cloud over Jethro Colton. After Cole was born to Jethro and his first wife, Brittany, she was killed in a drunk-driving accident. Then just after Brittany’s funeral, Cole was abducted from the mansion in what appeared to be a robbery gone wrong. The Dead River P.D. and the FBI mounted an extensive search. No ransom note ever came. And all leads eventually died.

This information just raised further questions for Jagger. Ranching did not ordinarily billionaires make. And where had Jethro’s sudden cash injection come from? How had the petty ex-con gotten so stinking rich overnight—proceeds of an earlier crime? Organized criminal links forged in prison? Was his first wife’s death really an accident? And why had Cole been abducted, if not for ransom?

Could it have been revenge? Payback?

Had the child been murdered?

Or was there a faint possibility that Cole Colton was still alive, living somewhere under another name, oblivious to his own past, just as Jagger had been for the first nine years of his life?

Then, near the end of July, after Cheyenne Colton had been found and one of Jethro’s ranch hands had been arrested in connection with the crime, Cheyenne’s mother, Amanda Colton, along with her two sisters, Gabriella and Catherine, appeared on national television offering a reward of $500,000 for any tips that might lead to finding their long lost half brother, Cole.

The move surprised Jagger. All of a sudden the family was looking again? Why?

With his news instincts now on fire again for the first time in over a year, something else had awakened deep inside Jagger—a desire to find justice for a baby boy who could so easily have been him. A tiny victim without a voice.

With a renewed sense of purpose, and yes, Jagger knew this newfound passion might just be another way to beat back the nightmares—but it was a better path than the one he’d been on—he pitched his story idea to a major television network on the premise that he, a kidnap victim himself, would go undercover at Dead River Ranch in an effort to solve a thirty-year-old mystery tied to a billionaire ex-con. And in some way, he would bring justice to Cole Colton, alive or dead.

The television producers jumped on the idea. With the TV deal came an agent, then a book contract. Jagger McKnight was back!
This
story would be his route back into a semblance of life as he’d once known it, before Afghanistan. Before the ambush. Before he’d been forced up against a journalistic line he’d been unable to cross, and because of it, everything he thought he’d known about himself had been shattered. Dead River Ranch and a thirty-year-old cold case had become Jagger McKnight’s personal Rubicon.

“What’ll you have, handsome?”

Jagger jumped and glanced up sharply.

A brown-haired waitress was leaning on one hip, chewing gum, her pen poised over her order pad. She had a coffee stain on her apron and a weary look around her eyes. Her name tag said “Grace.”

“Ranch burger is on special,” she said with a jerk of her chin toward the menu that she’d managed to place on the table without Jagger noticing.

He cleared his throat and quickly scanned the menu.

“Special looks great,” he said with a forced smile. “Extra fries. And a Budweiser. Thanks.”

Grace scribbled the order onto her pad then lifted her eyes, holding Jagger’s gaze a fraction longer than necessary. He recognized the look—it was one he’d seen in the faces of the nameless women he’d taken into his bed. The waitress found him interesting—attractive, even. And suddenly, like a sharp, blinding flash of light through his body, Jagger yearned for something clean and sunshiny fresh. For bright mornings without hangovers, for pure smiles. For the scent of shampoo with a name like Spring Breeze. The aroma of freshly baked muffins, laundered sheets that smelled like flowers and pine. A real and good woman in his arms. Hell, he couldn’t even articulate to himself what he was feeling right now—where these intense feelings came from. But they startled him in both their suddenness and ferocity, and inside he felt himself beginning to shake again.

One day at a time, McKnight. Just focus on the story...

“So, you just passing through, hon?” The waitress said as she took the menu from him.

“Looking for work.” He forced another smile and the waitress flushed slightly as she tucked the menu under her arm.

“My name is Grace. I’ll be right back with your beer.”

She sashayed pointedly behind the counter, and while she yelled his order through a hatch into the kitchen, Jagger took stock of the diner and its patrons.

In the booth across from him, two gray-whiskered men in plaid shirts nursed coffees, their large bellies propped up by faded denim and suspenders. Probably the semi drivers on a pit stop before they hit the road for the long, lonely night haul. Jagger had caught plenty of rides with men like them over the past year, sat beside them in truck cabs, allies through the solitary night.

Behind an old-style cash register on the diner counter near the door was a woman who looked to be in her early sixties with dull, dyed-black hair. She was writing something in a notebook. Diner manager, or owner, figured Jagger. Farther down the counter, three men were perched on padded stools, their backs to Jagger, cowboy hats at their sides. Their bodies were honed, their skin tanned. Men who labored physically for a living—ranch hands most likely.

A few more cowboys gathered around a table at the back of the diner where the lights were dimmer and music played from a jukebox—the ubiquitous Wyoming sound of country and western. Overhead, a fan slowly paddled the warm, greasy air.

Grace returned with his beer and plunked it on the table along with a glass.

“So, where are you looking for work, then?” she asked as she placed a caddy containing ketchup, salt and pepper in front of him.

Jagger reached for the beer and took a fast, hard draft straight from the bottle. He swallowed, relishing the sensation of calm spreading through his chest. “I heard Jethro Colton at the Dead River Ranch is hiring.” He dug into his jacket pocket and produced the job ad that he’d cut from the newspaper.

He slid the piece of paper across the table so Grace could see it, and he tapped it with his fingers. “Says here Dead River Ranch is seeking general ranch and maintenance hands—fencing, haying, minor mechanics, working cattle, four-wheeler operation.” He took another swig of beer and grinned. “Right up my street. Pay includes beef.”

The three men at the counter suddenly stopped talking.

One turned and eyed him. Jagger gave him a nod. With a subtle tip of his head, the cowboy returned Jagger’s acknowledgment before returning his attention to his meal on the counter. But Jagger could
feel
the men listening now. The black-haired diner boss had stopped writing in her book and was now studying him intently from her post at the counter. Slowly she reached for the phone at her side, dialed.

A soft prickle of unease ran up Jagger’s neck.

“That would be Gray Stark, the ranch foreman, who’s looking for hands,” Grace said with a nod to the piece of paper. “Jethro Colton’s dying—he’s not doing any hiring anymore, that’s for sure.”

“Dying?”

The chef placed a plate of food in the hatch and yelled out a number.

“That’ll be your order—I’ll be right back.” Grace hustled to fetch it and placed the plate in front of him.

“So you know about folk out on Dead River Ranch, then?” Jagger said.

“Some,” Grace said. Her gaze flicked to the diner owner talking on the phone, and she lowered her voice. “Dead is a small town. Talk gets around.”

“What’s wrong with Mr. Colton?” Jagger asked as he bit into his burger.