She hadn’t thought for a minute that it was. Everything about it, including this man, put her on full alert.
But how had she gotten to this place?
“I was at my apartment,” she mumbled. Was that right? She thought about it a second. Yes. That part was right. “But I don’t know how I got from there to here.”
Kade shut the door, though it was no longer connected to the top hinge, and he slipped his gun back into the leather shoulder holster beneath his jacket.
“Come on,” he said, catching onto her arm. He gave a heavy sigh. “I need to get you to a doctor.”
“No!” Bree couldn’t say it fast enough. She didn’t want to add another person—another stranger—to this mix. She shook off his grip. “I just need a phone. I have to call someone right away.”
“Yeah. You need to call your boss, Special Agent Randy Cooper. Or Coop as you call him. But I can do that for you while you’re seeing the doctor.”
Coop. That name was familiar, too, and it seemed right that he was her boss. It also seemed right that she’d get answers from him. Especially since this cowboy agent didn’t seem to be jumping to provide her with the vital information that she needed. She had to know if she could trust him or if she should try to escape.
Bree stared up at him. “Am I on assignment?”
Kade stared at her, too. Stared as if she’d lost her mind. He leaned down, closer, so they were eye to eye. “What the heck happened to you?”
She opened her mouth and realized she didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know. How did I get here?” She tried to get up again. “I need to call Coop. He’ll know. He’ll tell me why I’m here.”
“Coop doesn’t have a clue what happened to you.”
That got her attention and not in a good way. “What do you mean?”
Kade moved even closer. “Bree, you’ve been missing nearly a year.”
Oh, mercy. That info somehow got through the dizziness, but it didn’t make sense. Nothing about this did. What the heck was wrong with her?
Bree shook her head. “Impossible.”
He shoved up the sleeve of his black leather jacket and showed her a watch. He tapped his index finger on the date. June 13.
“June 13?” she repeated. Obviously, he thought that would mean something to her. It didn’t. That was because Bree had no idea what the date should be. Nor did she know the date of that last clear memory—when she’d been at her apartment.
“I didn’t know you were missing at first, not until a little over a month ago,” he continued. His voice trailed off to barely a whisper, but then he cleared his throat.
“What’s the last thing you remember before this place?” Kade asked. But he didn’t just ask. He demanded it. He seemed to be angry about something, and judging from his stare turned glare, she was at least the partial source of that anger.
But what had she done to rile him?
She cursed that question because she didn’t have an answer for it or any of the others.
Bree pushed her hair from her face. That’s when she noticed her hands were trembling. Her mouth was bone dry, too. “Someone drugged me, didn’t they?”
“Probably. Your pupils are dilated, and there’s not a drop of color in your face,” he let her know. “What’s the last thing you remember?” he repeated.
She forced herself to think. “I remember you. We were on assignment together at the Fulbright Clinic. Someone figured out I was an agent, and they drugged us. We had to shoot our way out of there.”
Bree glanced down at the thin scar on her left arm where a bullet had grazed her. It wasn’t red and raw as it should be. It was well-healed. But that couldn’t be right.
“And?” Kade prompted.
Bree shook her head. There was no
and.
“How long ago was that?”
“Nine and a half months.” His jaw muscles turned to iron. She might have been dizzy, but she didn’t miss the nine month reference.
Nine months.
As in just the right amount of time to have had a baby.
Her gaze flew back to him. This time Bree took a much longer and harder look at the cowboy. His face was more than just familiar. Those features. That body. Kade Ryland was drop-dead hot, and yes, she could imagine herself sleeping with him.
But had she?
She wasn’t a person who engaged in casual sex or sex with a fellow agent.
“We didn’t have sex, did we?” she asked.
Something shot through his ice-gray eyes. Some emotion she didn’t understand. “No,” he concluded. “But there was an opportunity for you to get pregnant. We were in a fertility clinic, after all.”
Oh, mercy. Had the doctors in the clinic done something to her? No, Bree decided. She would have known. She would have remembered that.
Wouldn’t she?
“After the shoot-out, other agents moved in to arrest the two security guards who tried to kill us,” Kade continued. “But we didn’t manage to apprehend everyone involved. Key evidence was missing, but the FBI decided to send in other agents to do the investigation since my identity had been compromised.”
Yes. That sounded right. It wasn’t an actual memory, though. None of this was, and that nearly sent Bree into a panic.
“And then you called your boss,” Kade continued, his voice calm despite the thick uneasiness in the room. “You said you were taking some vacation time.”
Still no memory. Bree just sat there, listening, and praying he would say something to clear the cobwebs in her head and that it would all come back to her.
“Two weeks later when you were supposed to check back in with Coop, you didn’t. You disappeared.” Kade caught her chin, forced it up. “Bree, I need you to think. Where have you been all these months?”
Again, she tried to think, to remember. She really tried. But nothing came. She saw flashes of herself in Kade’s arms. He was naked. And with his hard muscled body pressed against hers. He’d kissed her as if they were engaged in some kind of battle—fierce, hot, relentless.
Despite the dizziness, she felt her body go warm.
Bad timing, Bree,
she reminded herself.
“You, uh, have some kind of tattoo on your back? It’s like a coin or something?” She phrased it as a question just in case she was getting her memories mixed up, but she doubted she could ever mix up a man like Kade with anyone else.
“A concho,” he supplied. “With back to back double
R
’s, for my family’s ranch. You remember that?”
A ranch. Yes, he looked like a cowboy all right. She’d bet he wasn’t wearing those jeans, Stetson and boots to make a fashion statement. No, he was a cowboy to the core, and that FBI badge and standard issue Glock didn’t diminish that one bit.
“We kissed,” she recalled. Now,
here
was a crystal clear memory. His mouth on hers. A fake kiss with real fire. And a cowboy with an unforgettable taste. “To create the cover of a happily married couple.”
“But we didn’t have sex,” he clarified.
No. They hadn’t, and she was reasonably sure she would have remembered sleeping with Kade. She glanced at him again and took out the
reasonably
part.
She would have remembered
that.
“How did you find me?” Bree asked. There were so many questions and that seemed a good place to start.
“I set up a missing person’s hotline and plastered your picture all over the state. I didn’t say anything about you working for the FBI,” he added, just as she was on the verge of protesting.
The last part of his explanation caused her to breathe just a little easier. As a deep-cover agent, the last thing she wanted was her picture out there. Still, his plan had worked because here he was. He’d found her.
But why had he been looking?
Was he working for her boss, Coop?
“An hour ago, I got a tip from an anonymous caller using a prepaid cell,” Kade continued. “The person disguised their voice but said I’d find you here at the Treetop Motel, room 114. The person also said you were sick and might need a doctor.”
An anonymous caller using a prepaid cell. That set off alarms in her head. “Someone drugged me and dumped me here. That same someone might have been your caller.”
“That’s my guess.” He paused, huffed and rubbed his hand over his forehead as if he had a raging headache. “Look, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to put it out there so you can start dealing with it. I think someone in the fertility clinic inseminated you with the semen they got from me… .”
Kade hesitated, maybe to let that sink in. But how the heck could that sink in?
Bree gasped and looked down at her stomach. “I’m not pregnant. If I were, I’d be about ready to deliver.” She stretched the dress across her stomach to show him there was no baby bulge.
“You’ve already delivered, Bree. A baby girl. She’s about seven weeks old.”
She heard that sound. A hoarse moan that tore its way from her own throat. “You’re lying.” He
had
to be lying.
Kade didn’t take back what he’d said. He just stood there, waiting.
Bree tried to figure out how she could disprove the lie, and she glanced down at her stomach again.
“Go ahead,” Kade prompted. “Look at your belly. I don’t know if you’ll have stretch marks or not, but there’ll likely be some kind of changes.”
Bree frantically shook her head, but her adamant denial didn’t stop her from standing. Still wobbling, she turned away from Kade and shoved up the loose dress. She was wearing white bikini panties that she didn’t recognize, but the unfamiliar underwear was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Just slightly above the top of her panties was a scar.
Unlike the one on her arm, this one still had a pink tinge to it. It had healed, but the incision had happened more recently than the gunshot injury.
Probably about seven weeks ago.
Bree let go of the dress so it would drop back down. “What did you do to me?” She turned back to him. She would have pounded her fists against his chest if he hadn’t caught her hands. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. It wasn’t me. It was someone in the Fulbright Clinic.” Now it was Kade’s turn to groan, and that was her first clue that he was as stunned by this as she was.
They stood there, gazes locked. Her heart was beating so hard that she thought it might come out of her chest.
“Who did the C-section?” she demanded.
Kade shook his head, cursed. “I don’t know. Until now, I didn’t even know you’d had one, though the doctor in Silver Creek guessed. He said Leah’s head was perfectly shaped, probably because she’d been delivered via C-section.”
What little breath Bree had vanished.
“Leah?”
“That’s what I’ve been calling her. It was my grandmother’s name.”
“Leah,” she mumbled. Oh, mercy. None of this was making sense. “What makes you think she’s our child?”
“DNA tests,” he said without hesitation. “I got your DNA from the classified database in Quantico and compared it to Leah’s. It’s a match.”
There was so much coming at her that Bree could no longer breathe. Was this all true? Or maybe Kade and this baby story were figments of her drug-induced imagination. One thing was for certain. She needed to contact her boss. Coop was the only one she could trust right now.
And Coop had better tell her this was all some kind of misunderstanding.
“I need to use your cell phone,” she insisted.
“You can use it in the truck.” He took her by the arm. “Something bad obviously happened to you, and we need to find out what. That starts with a visit to the doctor so you have a tox screen.”
Bree didn’t dispute the fact that she might indeed need medical attention, but she had no reason to blindly trust Kade Ryland.
“I want to make that call now,” she demanded.
Kade stared at her, huffed again and reached in his coat pocket. But reaching for his phone was as far as he got. There was a noise just outside the door, and despite the drug haze, it was a sound that Bree immediately recognized.
Footsteps.
Kade drew his gun, and in the same motion, he shoved her behind him.
But it was too late.
Bree heard a swishing sound. One that she also recognized. Someone had a gun rigged with a silencer.
And a bullet came tearing through the thin wooden door.
Chapter Three
Kade threw his weight against Bree to push her out of the line of fire. She landed hard against the wall, and Kade had no choice but to land hard against her.
Another bullet came through the door, splintering out a huge chunk of the already-rickety wood. No one called out for them to surrender. No one bashed in the room to hold them at gunpoint.
And that meant the gunman had one goal: to kill Bree and him.
Later, he would kick himself for coming here without backup, but he’d been in such a hurry to rescue Bree that Kade had put standard procedures aside so he could get to her before she left the motel. Or before she was killed or kidnapped again. Finding her had been critical. But now the challenge was to get her out of there alive.
It was a risk, anything was at this point, but Kade moved from the wall so he could kick the dresser against the door. He gave it another shove to anchor it in place.
“That won’t stop him for long,” Bree mumbled.
No. It wouldn’t. But if the gunman had wanted to get inside, he could have easily knocked down the door before he started shooting. Firing through the door had likely been his way of trying to strike first without risking a direct showdown. If so, he knew Kade was armed. Maybe he even knew that Kade was an agent.
But who was he?
And why attack them?
Kade wanted those answers, and maybe he could get them from this Bozo if he could keep the guy alive. Of course, rescuing Bree was his first priority.
Kade had to do something to keep some space between the danger and Bree, so he fired directly into the door. Unlike the gunman’s shots, the one he fired was a loud thick blast that echoed through the room. He didn’t wait to see if he’d hit the target. He had to get Bree out of there.
Unfortunately, their options sucked.
Kade shoved her into the bathroom, such as it was. Barely five feet across with only a toilet and what was once a shower stall.