Stolen Goods: A Secret Baby Romance (2 page)

BOOK: Stolen Goods: A Secret Baby Romance
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“We didn’t know.”
Trentham shook her head, remaining calm in the face of his anger. “I didn’t
know. All I have to go by are the papers in our files.”

“That is the sole
reason I haven’t ripped you a new one by now.” Nolan straightened. “But you
better fucking believe my lawyers will be contacting the board that runs this
place.”

Trentham slowly
got to her feet. “Fair enough, Agent Findley. Would you care to see the
security footage now?”

The picture
quality was excellent. Nolan sat in his chair doing everything he could to keep
his breathing even, in spite of how his lungs had seemed to turn inside out. To
help ease his agitation, he whipped out his pad and took notes.

The woman came
through the side entrance typically reserved for deliveries—toilet paper and
carpet cleaner, not baby deliveries, which Nolan made certain to differentiate
in his report. She didn’t act furtive, she didn’t act suspicious and she didn’t
glance around in a manner that could even
possibly
be construed as
mysterious. She was, however, obviously guarded, reserved and distrusting of Doctor
Milliken, as evidenced by the way she attempted to avoid even accidental
contact with him. She refused to shake his hand and when he bumped into her
going around the first corner of the hallway, the woman flinched violently. It
appeared she’d given the doctor a dressing down too, but the cameras weren’t
equipped for sound, so Nolan only had her flying hands to judge by.

The woman’s face
was pretty in a sweet, wholesome,
unremarkable
way totally at odds with
the peculiar crime she’d committed. Rounded cheeks and chin, though tending
toward gaunt, as if she’d missed a few too many meals recently. She had blonde
hair verging on light brown, tucked back into a wispy braid that reached her
shoulders. Ordinary, nothing exotic or spectacular or eye-catching.

Her body was
harder to catalogue due to the sheer volume of fabric covering it. Nolan would
have guessed she possessed an average build, and even made a note of it, but
long hours into the surveillance proved him wrong. The angle of one camera was
able to catch just a portion of the interior of the room Milliken had led her
to, and, once he’d left, she disrobed without self-consciousness.

She was thin and
pale and drab, yet Nolan became riveted. Just the simple act of her pulling her
shirt over her head had him stilling in his seat and holding his breath, until
he got a good look at what was underneath. Skin marked by a few visible scars
made him wonder what sort of trauma she’d known and the shadows along her
ribcage made him estimate how many times a week she skipped eating. She was too
skinny, making her hipbones more prominent than necessary.

Nolan shifted in
his chair as he watched the process. Guilt and awkwardness stormed through him,
making him more fidgety than he dared to show. With Trentham at his side giving
him a running monologue of every piece of equipment visible in the room and its
function, he couldn’t show her how affected he was by the sight of one thin
woman…who was about to impregnate herself with his sperm.

Jesus, he had a
raging hard-on.

Nolan didn’t know
what was wrong with him. The woman was nothing special—
should
have been
nothing special. Ordinary and commonplace, no discernible features to make her
stand apart from the crowd beyond the scars she’d kept hidden under her
clothes. The heated wave of awareness that insisted on traveling up and down
his spine was surely nothing more than anger, betrayal and confusion over
why
someone would go to such lengths to conceive his child.

The idea that his
ex-wife had put the woman up to it as a surrogate was firmly lodged in Nolan’s
mind. He didn’t know the truth of it, but it wouldn’t surprise him. After all,
why his sample? It was enough to make him want to leave immediately and demand
answers from his ex.

But Nolan was
glued to his chair. “Will her weight affect the chances of conception?” he
asked.

“Yes.” Trentham
made a soft noise Nolan interpreted as pity. “There are many factors at play,
Agent Findley. I believe I can set your mind at ease about her chances of
conception. They have dwindled with each new thing I’ve learned about our
little criminal, and now I hardly think it’s even possible for her to have had
a successful implantation.”

Nolan cleared his
throat, unsure of how he felt about that statement. “Why mine?”

“Milliken only
said she picked. I don’t think he was privy to the inner workings of her
reasoning.”

“Huh.” Nolan did
his best to find a comfortable way to sit in the chair that suddenly felt too
confining and watch the rest of the film.

Hours passed as
the footage rolled on. There were times Nolan became so uncomfortable he could
hardly breathe, but he sat like stone and waited it out. His belly flipped like
a circus act, but he watched the whole process and ignored the demanding ache
in his balls. And the squeezing around his heart.

“It seems like
that should take longer,” he whispered, only half-aware he spoke out loud.

“It’s outpatient
surgery,” Trentham explained. “I will admit we usually do this with a bit more
finesse and a qualified anesthesiologist, but this was an illegal procedure, so
that should be taken into account.”

“She wasn’t
comfortable being alone with him, half-naked.”

Trentham nodded.
“I noticed.”

“It makes me
curious about her.”

“Agent Findley,
I’m sure there are many things that make you curious about the woman. Do you
think you’ll find her?”

Nolan took a deep
breath and felt determination fill his lungs in equal measure with oxygen. His
heart pounded and his blood heated, his answer was grim. “I won’t stop until I
do.”

 

3

 

 

 

It took two days
to get his first lead.

Nolan only
flinched a little when the file folder landed on his desk with a flat
thwack
that indicated there wasn’t much inside. He glanced up to see one of the newer
agents standing in front of him.

“Weslyn Marie
Moon,” his coworker said cheerfully. “You got lucky. The San Diego office had a
grainy photo. They believe she’s responsible for an art forgery connected to a
murder they were looking into a couple years back.”

“A murder?” Nolan
snapped up the folder. “They think she’s involved?”

“Not anymore.” The
other agent shook his head. “Guy commissioned a painting from her. A few days
after she dropped it off, he turned up dead. He had a cheap security camera
watching his premises and San Diego PD picked up the surveillance footage.”

Nolan lifted a
brow in his comrade’s direction. “Did they bring her in?”

“Didn’t find her
and they’re not wasting time looking.” The other man shook his head again. “I
talked to the agent in charge of the case. Lot of money involved, but it’s low
priority. Nobody can even say for sure if she’s the artist, but her name came
up.”

“Low priority?”
Nolan scanned the first few sheets inside the folder he held. “It says here she
was wanted for questioning concerning a forgery of a Hobbema masterpiece.”

The other agent
nodded. “The guy gave a fake Hobbema landscape to his dope supplier, but the
supplier obviously wasn’t satisfied. Local police caught the guy’s thugs
responsible for the murder and nobody seems to know who the girl is. She’s only
on the hook for forging art.”

“Doctor Milliken
commissioned a fake Lepine from the lady. Guess she’s got a thing for nature.”

“If that’s what
you call it. I mean, where are the ‘happy little trees’ huh? The pictures in
that folder look like the drab things my grandma used to hang over the back of
her couch.”

“Have a little
more respect for great art.” Nolan’s exhale ruffled the edge of the paper he
held. “Why would a drug dealer want a phony landscape with a lesser-known Dutch
Master’s signature on it?”

“He was a very
high end dealer. He had twelve forged paintings and drawings in his house, but
only the Hobbema was from Moon.” The other man winced. “San Diego PD put it
down as coincidence. She wasn’t involved in anything else.”

“Nothing but
forging art and stealing jizz.” Nolan flipped through the meager contents of
the folder to find the woman’s photo.

He stared at the
picture, but it didn’t have the answers he sought. It was hard to see anything
noteworthy in the photo at all, considering the quality of the print. Only the
side of the woman’s face was visible and the background was nearly too dark to
make out what she was wearing. Still, the curve of her jaw seemed like a match,
and the angle of her chin could
possibly
be the same.

Maybe…maybe…but the
black and white image in his hand didn’t come close to capturing the quiet
caution of the woman on camera at the Barre Birth and Reproductive Center. It
didn’t sizzle with the hidden vitality of the woman herself.

Nolan threw the
photo down in frustration. “How in the hell do they think anyone could make a
positive ID from this?”

“Ah, Findley,
don’t underestimate the technology we have today. Computers have come so far.”
The other agent leaned forward to tap the photo in about the spot the woman’s
ear would be. “Side profiles are nearly as good as fingerprints, you know.”

“I need more.”
Nolan ran his gaze over the photo again. “This is a good start, though.”

A week later,
Nolan found Weslyn Moon’s birth certificate. Another week after that, he found
documents giving the state of Pennsylvania custody over her. He was surprised
to learn that her mother had tried to remand her three children to the state
when Weslyn was only two years old.

Nolan looked into
the paperwork, which took another month to track down. He used all the
persuasive charm in his repertoire to get the clerks to let him have a peek,
but the effort paid off—for his own curiosity, if not for the unofficial case
he was working.

Just days after a
hospital stay in which Welsyn’s mother had been treated for broken ribs, she’d
visited Child Protective Services. Over the course of a decade, Weslyn’s mother
had also suffered broken wrists, legs, a fractured jaw and a handful of concussions.
She was a clumsy woman. She had a terrible, fatal accident just days after the
state came for her children. Her husband asked to take his children to their
mother’s funeral, and the whole family disappeared for several years.

Slipped through
the cracks.

When they
resurfaced, ten years later and a thousand miles from where they’d started,
they were a member down. Weslyn Moon’s sister was found in a ditch—bloody,
broken and sexually assaulted before death. Weslyn had a broken leg. The state
dug through the little that was known about the family and sent for the old
case files from their previous home. Weslyn and her brother were taken from her
remaining parent, but father and son were reunited in jail, which, in Nolan’s
opinion, was exactly where the two abusive bastards belonged.

Throughout the
next month, Nolan gathered evidence of Weslyn’s time in foster care. Only one
of her four homes was deplorable, the rest truly tried to reign in the lost and
bitter little girl Weslyn had been. She had a juvenile record as a runaway—and
opening
those
files had taken a lot of string-pulling on Nolan’s behalf.
Whatever rebellion she’d possessed in her soul, however, came out in an
unusually quiet resistance to authority. She was stubborn and reserved, and
tended to stay away from home for days in a row, though she almost always came
back.

As a teenager, she
didn’t get into fights, she didn’t steal and she didn’t commit major crimes.
Predominantly trespassing, breaking curfew and skipping school, a few slaps on
the wrist for being intoxicated in public—until her late teens, when she was
picked up, high as hell and carrying a good deal of marijuana. It was enough to
have her charged with distribution, but the court sentenced her to rehab
instead.

Thirty days later
she got out. A week after that, she was admitted to the hospital with broken
ribs. Like her mother, so long before. Her boyfriend was picked up for assault
because the quiet little mouse had the brass balls to press charges. Then she
fingered him for the weed and testified against him. She moved across country
and he got a year in prison.

The manila folder
marked ‘Weslyn Marie Moon’ got thicker. Much thicker. And still Nolan kept
looking for more information, more clues as to who the cautious, delicate
criminal was. She haunted him day and night, until she was almost a memory, a
fascinating companion in his search for the truth.

He had to know
more about her, had to learn everything he could.

“She’s become an
obsession for you.”

Nolan rocked back
on his heels and tried not to scream at his superior. “No, sir. I’m just trying
to figure out what happened.”


Four
months, and half the information you’ve gotten has nothing to do with her
crimes at the Reproductive Center, Findley.”

“I’ve been trying
to figure out if my ex put her up to this. You know that”

“I also know your
ex has denied any involvement.”

“She’s known to
lie, sir.”

The Special Agent
in Charge of the Buffalo field office shook his head, but also started to hand
Nolan a sheet of paper, before holding it just out of reach. “I shouldn’t give
this to you. I should have had someone else take over your investigation a long
time ago, Findley. Four months is way too long to be digging around a woman’s
past for no reason.”

“There is a
reason,” Nolan snapped. “I told you, she forges art—”

“Relax.” The other
man shook the paper he held. “I’m giving this to you, aren’t I? That’s her
address. Had to push a little, but a family planning clinic in Chicago finally
admitted to taking her on as a patient.”

Adrenaline slammed
through Nolan’s body.  Lightheaded, ears ringing and hands shaking, he accepted
the paper and looked it over. A minor revolt took place in his chest. He
couldn’t identify what he was experiencing, didn’t even know if there were
enough words in the English language to describe it, but he struggled to keep
his fingers from clenching the paper, and he locked his knees against their
need to buckle.

Her image flashed
through his head. Quiet and reserved, pretty, fragile and delicate. And
possibly pregnant with his child. The same image he’d seen day after day and
night after night, haunting his dreams.

It took three
tries to form words. “Family planning?”

“The clinic also
focuses on general women’s health, too, Findley. Remember what that doctor in
Vermont told you. It’s almost guaranteed those eggs never took inside her.”

Still,
still
.
Nolan breathed deep and held it in for as long as possible. His head swam, his
pulse spiked. He didn’t want to think about the surge of hope that prodded at
his sanity or what it possibly meant.

He was about to
get his own, personal Public Enemy Number One. That was all.

“I’m going to need
some time off,” he mumbled.

BOOK: Stolen Goods: A Secret Baby Romance
13.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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