Special Forces Father (16 page)

“How did you do that?” she asked, gesturing toward the window. She felt as though
someone had punched her in the stomach.

He reached out a hand and touched the back of one of hers. “I climbed the tree. That branch was barely long enough for me to reach the window and climb in,” he said.

“Trav—” she managed to say, but then her throat totally closed off again and it was all she could do to get air into her straining lungs. “But—the glass. What did you do?” she asked.

“Glass cutter and a suction cup.”

Kate frowned.

“I stuck the suction cup on the glass, then cut a circle with the glass cutter. You probably heard the squealing of the cutter. Then I lifted the circle of glass out and reached in to unlock the window.”

“Oh,” she said, not really taking in everything he said. It didn’t matter. He was here.

“Where’s Max?” he asked, looking
past her. For an instant, her motherly instinct rose up and she had the odd notion that she needed to protect her child from the paint-smeared apparition that stood in front of her. Travis must have felt her stiffen, because he stood still and held out his hands, palms toward her. “I promise I’ll do my best not to scare him,” he whispered. “But we need to get you both out of here—now.”

Kate
closed her eyes tightly and willed herself to believe that he was real. Then she held out a hand. He took it in his. She felt his warmth, his strength, his solidity. The lock on her throat released.

“How did you find us?” she murmured and reached up to wrap her arms around his neck. He stiffened at first, but then he must have realized how badly she needed him to hold her, just for a couple
seconds.

She tightened her arms around his neck and buried her nose in the hollow of his shoulder, clinging to him as if he were a lifeline in a turbulent ocean. He pressed his cheek against her hair for a few precious seconds. Then he pushed her away.

“We’re running out of time,” he said, meeting her gaze. A small smile curved his lips. “Are you ready to get out of here?” he asked her.

“You can get us out?”

He placed a hand around the back of her neck and gently pulled her toward him, pressing his lips against her ear. “You bet I can. Now come on. Priority one is getting you and Max out of harm’s way. So, what do you need to do to be ready?”

Kate still couldn’t quite get control of her emotions. Travis’s hand on her neck felt warm and reassuring, but at the same
time, it felt iron hard and controlling. She’d never seen this side of him before. He was cloaked in darkness, even down to the black face paint across his cheekbones and nose and forehead. She could barely see him in the dim light that seeped through the brush outside from the other trailers and the moon and stars. But what she saw was a man, a soldier, a warrior.

“I’m ready now,” she said.

Travis stared at Kate, his son’s mother and the woman he’d always loved. She was exhausted. He could see it in the slump of her shoulders, in the dark circles under her eyes, but she stood straight and tall, ready to do whatever he needed her to do to save her child.

Their child.

He’d hardly dared to look past her at the sleeping boy. He wasn’t sure how he was going to react when
he came face-to-face with his son for the first time. He had missed so much already. First smile, first laugh, first word, first steps, first tooth. Precious time that he could never recapture. He didn’t know much about babies or little boys, but he knew that those four years he’d missed contained a lifetime of irreplaceable firsts. But he had to drag his thoughts back to the moment at hand. He had
to get Kate and Max to safety. As he’d told her, that was priority one. Then he’d call Reilly and give him the signal to close in and take the kidnappers.

“Okay,” he said roughly, his voice hoarse from emotion. “I’m going to lift you up. You’ll grab the top of the window, slide out backward, then drop to the ground. Be prepared. The drop is about five feet, because the trailer is up on blocks.
Then I’ll pick up Max and lower him out the window to you.” He took a step backward and eyed her, head to toe. “Where are your shoes?” he asked, and immediately remembered seeing a high heel on the floor of the living room.

She looked down. “I lost one in the house,” she said, “and I kicked the other one off so I could walk. It’s okay, Travis. I can do it.”

“Walk barefoot through the
woods and on the road, carrying Max?”

She lifted her chin and eyed him defiantly. “Yes,” she said. “I can do it.”

Travis didn’t know what he could do. He couldn’t give her his boots. They’d just slide right off her feet. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

“I need to wake him,” Kate said, turning toward the sleeping child. “I need to explain who you are and tell him
what’s going to happen.”

“No,” Travis said. “He’ll be half-asleep and I can have him out the window and into your arms before he wakes up. Will he cry?”

She shook her head. “No. He always wakes up happy. Or at least—” She paused and looked at him. “He did before all this.”

“Good.” He pulled her close. “Once you have Max, you need to run as fast as you can toward the north.”

Kate angled her head and he knew she was trying to figure out which direction was north.

“Listen to me,” he said urgently. “When you drop to the ground, you’ll be in dense woods, lots of trees and lots of underbrush. You’ll be facing the trailer. That’s east, okay?”

She nodded.

“Turn ninety degrees to your left. That will be north. Move straight ahead as quietly as you can. There
are lots of vines and briars. It’s going to be hard without shoes, but push through. Scratches aren’t important. Staying alive is. Within about twenty feet you’ll be out of the underbrush. Look ahead. Slightly to your right, in the distance, is a tower with red lights on it. Head straight for that tower as fast as you possibly can, carrying Max. You’ll see a gas station on the other side of an asphalt
road. It’s closed and dark. My brother Lucas will meet you there. If he’s not there when you get there, you’ll find a bathroom on the west side of the station. It’s unlocked. Go in there and lock the door from the inside and wait for him. Ask him who he is.”

He felt her head shaking side to side. Pulling away, he met her gaze. It was wide and frightened.

“Just stay there?” she said shakily.
“In that bathroom? I won’t be able to see anything. What if something happens? What if—?”

“Kate, this operation is planned down to the second. Lucas will be there. I will see you in less than two hours, I promise,” he said, looking her straight in the eye. “I promise you, Kate. On my life. You can depend on me.”

She looked at him for a long time, not blinking, not speaking. Then, slowly,
she nodded.

He pressed his lips against her forehead. “Kate,” he whispered softly, “I love you.”

Her gaze flickered, then met his steadily. “I know you do,” she murmured.

But in his head he heard the words she didn’t say.
I just don’t know if that’s enough.

“Now let’s get you out that window.”

* * *

K
ATE
WAITED
,
shivering, not with cold but with fear, for Travis to
lower Max out the window and into her arms. The tangle of vines, tree branches and underbrush around and under the window was dismaying. She was balanced with one bare foot on a root and the other sank into what felt like a pile of leaves. Her feet already hurt, but like she’d told Travis, she could do it. Max was her number one priority.

Then through the window she heard, “Mommy!”

She jerked.
Oh, no.
Max had woken up when Travis picked him up. Probably, he’d instinctively known that it wasn’t his mommy picking him up and he’d woken, seeing Travis’s scary, black-streaked face, and panicked.

“Mah—” he cried, stopping in the middle of the word. What had Travis done? She heard scraping and rustling of clothes through the high, small window, then saw Max’s head, then his
body, come through the window. Travis was holding him with a hand under each arm. She reached up and caught her little boy by the waist as Travis lowered him down. In the distance, she heard footsteps echoing on the hollow trailer floor.

“That’s Bent, the kidnapper!” she whispered urgently to Travis. “Let go! I’ve got Max.”

Travis leaned farther out the window. Kate wrapped her arms
around her little boy just as Travis let him go. She tightened her embrace and started moving with baby steps toward the north, ducking her head and shielding Max’s face with her hand.

“Mah-mee, that soldier gave me my car,” he said, his voice a mixture of excitement and fear.

“Run!” Travis whispered.

Kate bent and pushed through the branches, vines and brush as fast as she could.
She stumbled when she stepped free of the clinging foliage. Ahead of her were the flashing red lights of the tower. She hiked Max up into her arms and set off at a lumbering jog, the fastest she could go in bare feet while carrying Max.

She wanted to glance back at the trailer so badly. Though she did feel as though the hounds of hell were nipping at her heels, she was desperate to know that
Travis was okay. But the foliage was too dense. Even if she looked behind her, she wouldn’t be able to see anything.

“Mommy, stop!” Max cried, his little hands fisted around the material of her shirt. He was kicking and squirming. “Mommy!”

“Shh,” she whispered. “Shh, Maxie. Don’t cry. We’re pl-playing hide-and-seek, okay?” she gasped, out of breath. “Shh.”

“Hide-and-seek?” Max whispered,
then squealed, “Yea!”

She prayed that Travis was okay and that he’d stopped the kidnapper from following her and Max. She pushed on, slowing down as Max became heavier and squirmed more. “Max, be still. I can’t hold on to you.”

“Hide now!” he squealed.

She shook him as best she could. “Hush!” she snapped.

Just as he sniffled and opened his mouth to start crying, she heard a
sound that ripped through her like heat lightning.

It was a gunshot.

Travis!
She stopped and turned. The deep gray sky had turned darker with purple. Soon that predawn darkness would lighten, and neutral gray shadows would change to deep purplish-pink. In the slight glow of dark purple, she saw Shirley, jogging toward them, brandishing something in her hand that caught the pale moonlight
like—like steel. It was a gun. And beneath the gun was a large, bright flashlight.

Kate hiked Max higher in her arms and ran, ignoring the stones and gravel and twigs that tore at her bare feet. “Max,” she panted. “We’re the good guys and they—” she gestured with her head “—they’re the bad guys. Stay still so I ca-can outrun them.”

To her relief, Max stopped wiggling and turned backward
to watch the woman. “She’s catching up, Mommy! Hurry!”

I’m hurrying,
she thought, too out of breath to speak. Then she realized she was no longer on the ground. She was on asphalt.
The road.
She blinked and squinted in front of her. There was the gas station. But there was no one waiting to pick them up. She moaned quietly, then tightened her grip on her son. “Maxie, we’re almost there,”
she wheezed. “Al-almost there.”

She ran around the left side of the station, praying that Travis was right about the bathroom. He was. Rushing inside, she slammed the door, plunging Max and her from the grayish purple world of early dawn into total blackout.

“Mommy!” Max shrieked when she put him down. Her arm muscles burned like fire as she felt around for a lock. There wasn’t a lock
on the doorknob, so she ran her fingers up the edge of the door—and touched a metal tube. A chain lock? She felt on the door facing and found a chain. Fumbling, she finally had hold of the clasp on the end of the chain and pushed it into its corresponding hold on the door.
Locked.

Her wheezing breaths turned into sobs. Behind her, Max was crying.

“Max,” she said, “come here.” She pulled
him into her arms and held him tightly, hugging him.

“Mommy, it stinks,” Max said. “Phew!”

She took a breath and realized that he was right. The bathroom did stink. “That’s okay,” she muttered. “It stinks, but nobody can get in.”

Kate felt around on the dirty, sticky floor, trying to get an idea of how large the room was and what all was in it. She knew that if Shirley figured out
where they were, she could shoot through the wooden door. Kate needed something that could serve as a shield. Next to the toilet was a large plastic wrapped case of toilet tissue. It was hardly enough to stop a bullet, but maybe if the slug went through the door, then through the paper, it would slow it down. Then, in the far corner, next to the lavatory, she struck gold. A large metal waste can.

“Max,” she said. “Want to play a real game of hide-and-seek?” She had no idea how Max was going to react to the idea of being stuffed into a smelly waste can in a smelly bathroom. But if that’s what it took to protect him, then she’d make him do it. By now her eyes had adapted to the dark as much as they were going to. She could see a sliver of light coming in over the door. It wasn’t enough
light to lend color, or even shape, to most things, but she could see the trash can. She picked it up and emptied the contents on the floor as far into the opposite corner of the room as possible. Then she brushed Max’s hair back from his forehead.

“Max, I want you to climb into this can, okay? It’s your secret hiding place.”

“Mommy, I’m sleepy.”

“I know, honey, and you can go to
sleep as soon as you’re in the ca—the hiding place. Come on. I’ll help you in.”

“I don’t want to,” he said firmly. “That’s not fun.”

She pulled him close. “I want you to hide in there. The bad guys are coming and we have to hide. Now you need to get in the hiding place. Right now. I’ll be right behind the can and you can knock and I’ll knock back. We can tap out songs on the can—the
hiding place. How’s that?” She could hear the desperation in her voice. If Shirley kept up the pace she’d been jogging, she’d be across the road any second now.

“Okay, Mommy,” Max said, so solemnly that Kate knew he was reacting to her fear and worry. She quickly lifted him into the can. “Now crouch down and get comfortable, okay?” she said.