Chapter Two
Dirk pulled his metallic-orange Viper to a stop in front of Megan O'Brien's gray, two-story house. Five months ago he had walked out her front door and never looked back.
Meg had meant everything to him. He'd meant nothing to her.
She needed him now. She trusted him. But Dirk didn't trust her.
Still, he knew how much she loved her son and he would do everything in his power to see her little boy safely returned to her.
She parked in the garage as he grabbed his Browning nine mil out of the center console and clipped the holster beneath his shirt at the back of his jeans. Climbing out of the car, he walked up on her front porch. Just standing there made his chest feel tight.
The door opened. “Come on in.” Meg stepped back so he could walk past, then turned toward a stout, heavyset older woman with iron-gray hair. “This is Rose Wills. She's my housekeeper and Charlie's nanny. She discovered Charlie missing just a few minutes before I got back from grocery shopping.”
He could see the fear in the older woman's round, lined face, the same fear Meg tried and failed to hide. “I'm Dirk Reynolds, Mrs. Wills. What time did you last see Charlie?”
“I looked in on him about two o'clock. He was napping. I went up again at three to check on him and he was . . .” She covered her mouth with trembling fingers, dragged in a steadying breath. “Charlie was gone.”
“I thought maybe he had just ... you know ... climbed out of his bed and ... and wandered off,” Meg said. “We looked all over, but . . .” Her voice broke. Meg was hanging on hard. Dirk crushed the urge to comfort her. “We couldn't find him. The doors were locked so we knew he couldn't have gone outside. I went back upstairs and that's when I found . . . I found the note.”
“Where is it?”
Meg turned, hurried off to get it. She was just as beautiful as the last time he'd seen her. She was one of La Belle's top models, a blue-eyed redhead he'd been drawn to the moment he'd spotted her standing next to her best friend, Valentine Hart, the model Ethan was engaged to marry.
Dirk wasn't the type to fall for a woman, but he had fallen hard for Meg.
She returned downstairs with the note, holding it by one corner. “I touched it when I took it out of the envelope. After I realized what it was, I tried to be careful. I thought there might be fingerprints or something.”
“There might be. We can always hope.” He motioned for her to set it and the envelope on the dining table, looked down and scanned the words on the single sheet of paper.
We have your son. He'll cost you ten million in cash. You've got three days or he's dead. No police.
“I need to look at Charlie's bedroom.”
Meg nodded, led him up the stairs. Though a La Belle model made plenty of money, the house wasn't extravagant; just a four-bedroom family home with comfortable, overstuffed, easy-to-care-for furniture in the living and family rooms. Her home's Madison Park address, however, put the house over the million-dollar mark.
They walked into a room decorated with pale blue walls, one of them papered in miniature sailboats. The blanket on the bed had a similar design. Meg walked over to the youth bed, stared down at the blanket, and her eyes filled with tears.
Dirk remembered how the blue always seemed brighter when she talked about her son. The little boy was her world. There was no room for Dirk anywhere in it. Meg had refused even to allow Dirk to meet him. The memory sliced open the old wound in his chest.
His resolve strengthened. He wasn't going there. Not now. Not ever again.
He ignored the way the light gleamed on the fine strands of her long, fiery red hair and turned to examine the room. There were pictures of the boy on the dresser. Dirk walked over and picked one of them up, a fairly recent photo of mother and son. The boy had the same red hair and blue eyes as his mother, the same wide, exuberant smile. Meg wasn't smiling now.
“At least now I know what he looks like,” Dirk said.
Her head came up. She knew what he meant. In Meg's eyes, he hadn't even been good enough to be in the same room with her son.
“I was afraid if he got to know you, he would get attached to you. I didn't want him to be hurt.”
“Right.” He held up the three-by-five photo. “I need this for identification.”
“Of course. Take it.”
He slid the picture out of the frame and tucked it into his shirt pocket. He wished seeing the little boy's face didn't make things even more personal. He continued to survey the room. The kid had only been alone in the bedroom for an hour. How had the bastard gotten in and out without being seen?
“What about your alarm system?” Dirk asked, turning back to Meg. “How did they get past the system without setting it off?”
“We don't keep it on in the daytime. It's a very secure neighborhood. Good for a family. That's why I picked this house in the first place.”
Made sense. “All right. What about security cameras? You got them, right? After I mentioned you needed to get some?”
She glanced away. “Once the tour was over and the police caught Delilah's killer, it didn't seem important. I wasn't in danger anymore.” She looked up at him, guilt sliding into her pretty blue eyes. “I should have gotten them like you said. They could help us find Charlie now. I should have gotten them, but I didn't.”
He caught her shoulders, wished he hadn't as soon as he felt the zip of awareness roll through him. “Nothing about this is your fault. We'll use what we've got, okay? We're just getting started, yeah?”
She swallowed, nodded. “Okay.”
He left her and walked over to the window. The screen was missing. He spotted it lying on the grass in the yard below. The paned sash window had been raised and not completely pushed back down. A trace of cold air whispered past the pale blue curtains. Beyond it, the hip roof was easily accessed by a latticework trellis climbing up from the back of the house.
Damn.
He should have taken a better look at the security in the home when he'd been there. Would have insisted she make changes if he'd been around longer. As it was, he'd only been here a couple of days after the tour ended before Meg punted him out.
“Looks like they came in from the backyard. I need to know who's been out there. I need a list of people, anyone with access to the house. Repairmen, the guys who mow your lawn, cleaning people. Everyone.”
“Okay.”
“Get Mrs. Wills to help. She might think of someone you miss.”
“All right.”
He walked back to the little boy's bed, bent down toward the boy's pillow, recognized the pungent sweet smell. “Chloroform. That's how they got Charlie out without him making any noise.”
“Oh, God. It won't hurt him, will it?”
“He'll be okay. Odds are he'll sleep a couple of hours before he wakes up.” He didn't mention the possibility of an overdose or the headache the kid was going to have when he regained consciousness. She had enough to worry about already.
“I've got a fingerprint kit in my car. I'll grab it and be right back. Don't touch anything.”
“I won't,” Meg promised.
“I need to take a look outside, see if I can find some footprints or any other trace of these guys.”
“You think it was more than one person?”
“As Rose said, it seems to have been well planned, so yeah. I think several people are involved.”
Meg said nothing. The fear in her eyes said it all.
“I need to move my car,” he said. “You got room in your garage?”
“You think they might be watching the house?”
“Might be, might not. Might just be doing an occasional drive-by. I'd rather play it safe. They're going to call eventually. Give you instructions. If they know I'm here, we tell them I'm the one who's going to negotiate the deal.”
“There's room for your car. I'll open the garage door.”
Dirk nodded, turned, and headed downstairs. He needed facts, information. Once he had a lead, he'd bring Sadie in to help. Sadie Gunderson worked as a computer expert at BOSS, Inc., where he was a private investigator/bodyguard/pretty much jack-of-all-trades.
He was ex-military, Special Forces, a former Ranger. He had extensive weapons training. Working as a PI with Ethan Brodie, once a Dallas homicide detective, Ethan's brother, Luke, a bounty hunter, and their cousins, Ian and Nick, both ex-cops, had given Dirk invaluable experience.
Along with the training he'd had in the army, he seemed to have a natural knack for sniffing out clues. He'd find the bastards who had taken Meg's boy. She was right about that.
And he would see they got exactly what they deserved.
* * *
It felt strange having Dirk in the house. Like having something wild and untamed prowling the hallways. He had always seemed out of place, like an animal that needed to be released from its cage.
He'd only been in her home a few days after one of the La Belle models had been murdered. Dirk had accompanied her to the funeral as her bodyguard. Then she and the other girls had flown to Texas to begin the fashion show tour. Dirk Reynolds and Ethan Brodie had been part of the security team. Charlie had stayed in Seattle with her parents.
Throughout the tour, Dirk had stuck by her side, determined to protect her. She could feel that same determination now, directed toward the safe return of her son. Somehow it soothed her.
Just watching him stalking through the house searching for clues seemed to steady her. Dirk would bring Charlie home. No matter what it took.
She found Rose Wills at the dining table, a box of Kleenex on top, a tissue clutched in her pudgy hand. She dabbed it beneath her eyes.
“It's going to be okay, Rose.” Meg sat down beside her, not completely sure if she was saying the words for Rose or for herself. “Dirk's going to help us find Charlie.”
“Mr. Reynolds . . . he isn't what I expected.”
Under different circumstances, Meg might have smiled. “No, he isn't. But he knows what he's doing.”
“It was him, wasn't it? He was your bodyguard on the tour.”
“Yes.”
“I heard you and your friend Val talking about him once. You said he was an amazing man.” Valerie Hartman was one of Meg's best friends, also a former model. She was engaged to Dirk's best friend. Val had been brave enough to risk loving Ethan Brodie.
“Dirk
is
amazing.”
“I think he has a tattoo.”
“There's a dragon on his shoulder.” A very sexy dragon, but now wasn't the time to remember that. “The dragon's head climbs up to the base of his neck. Sometimes when he moves, part of it shows above the collar of his shirt.”
“I see.”
She wondered what Rose Wills did see when she looked at Dirk. The same thing her father would have seen: a man who would never fit in at the country club or among her dad's high-society friends. One of the reasons she had ended their brief affair.
“We need to make a list of anyone who has or had access to the house in the last few weeks.” She pointed to the notepad she had retrieved from the downstairs study she used as an office. “I've written down the gardener, the cleaning lady, the part-time babysitter.” A young woman who filled in on weekends if she was needed, or when Rose had time off. “Oh, and the window washers.”
“The carpet-cleaning people were in last week.”
She wrote it down. “Anyone else?”
Rose pressed a hand to her forehead, rubbed a spot in the middle. “It's hard to concentrate. All I can think of is little Charlie. Is he okay? Is he scared or hungry?”
Meg's chest clamped down.
Rose plucked a fresh Kleenex out of the box and dabbed her eyes. “I'm sorry. I just ... I feel so responsible.”
Meg swallowed against the tightness in her throat. She had to be strong for Charlie. For all of them. “This was well planned. There's no way you could have known something like this would happen.” She reached over and gripped the older woman's hand. “We have to stay calm. We have to help Dirk.”
“Yes, yes, you're right.” Rose took a deep breath. “It does seem to have been well planned. Maybe whoever took Charlie knew your schedule. Knew you would be gone this afternoon. On Wednesday you always go to the gym, then do your grocery shopping after. Who would have known that?”
Meg looked up as Dirk walked down the stairs and strode toward her. “No prints. The room was wiped clean.” He paused in front of her, hands on his narrow hips, looking like a woman's erotic fantasy. Meg knew firsthand, Dirk was exactly that.
“Rose is right about them knowing your schedule. Like I said, maybe they've been watching the house. Or maybeâ”
He drilled her with a glare. “Are you seeing someone, Meg? Dating someone you've only recently met?” The edge in his voice hadn't been there before. “Has he been to the house? Maybe the two of you are sleeping together?”
“No! I'm not seeing anyone! I'm not interested in dating.” She didn't add she hadn't been remotely interested in any other man since she had met Dirk.
“You sure?” he pressed.
“I'm not a liar. You know me better than that. Do you really think I'd keep something important from you when you're trying to save my son?”
His hard look softened. “You're not a liar. And I know how much you love your boy.”
She glanced away from the unanswered question in his eyes.
So why hasn't there been anyone else?
He pulled out a dining room chair and sat down next to her. She forced herself to ignore the heat radiating off his hard body.