CHAPTER 1
He had trespassers.
Two of them.
Dressed for jogging in shorts and a T-shirt, Special Agent Gage McKinnon eased open his front door just a crack and peered out into the small front garden of the house he rented.
What were they up to? He could hear them out there, laughing and whispering together, but he couldn’t make out the words in the crisp high mountain air of the Park City summer morning.
He didn’t think they were dangerous, but if he’d learned anything in his thirty-five years, he’d learned not to underestimate the female of the species. These two looked to be about three or four. One was slightly smaller than the other by a few inches and a little more round but besides that, they could have been twins. Same dark, curly hair, same flashing brown eyes, same little ski slopes for noses.
Where did they come from? And what were they up to?
He put his plans for a run up the mountainside temporarily on hold and watched them for a few moments longer. Ah, now he figured it out. Each of the girls had her pink nightie hitched up into a sort of basket, revealing small olive legs and matching Barbie panties. Into their makeshift carriers, they were both piling what looked like just about every single flower in his yard, roots and all.
Daisies, geraniums, purple lavender. They plucked some of each.
He didn’t care about the flowers. They could have the whole garden, as far as he was concerned. But he had a feeling his landlady wouldn’t see things the same way. In the month he’d lived here, she had been by at least three times a week to baby these and the even bigger garden in the back. He figured this wanton pilfering would not make her happy.
Gage opened the door wider and walked out onto the porch. The sun had barely crept over the horizon of the surrounding mountains with their wide ski runs, bare of snow now but still a pale contrast to the dark evergreens covering the slopes.
The early-morning air was cool. He hadn’t spent much time in Utah since his childhood but it hadn’t taken him long to remember that temperatures in these high mountain valleys could often dip below freezing at night, even in June.
These girls weren’t exactly dressed for cool weather.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
Two dark heads whipped around as his voice sliced through the still morning. The smaller girl looked suddenly terrified, her eyes and her little mouth both open wide. She clutched her nightie with one hand and what looked like a stuffed monkey with the other as she edged slightly behind the other girl, who gave him a winsome smile that had most likely been her ticket out of far worse trouble than some plucked flowers.
“Hi, mister. We’re picking flowers for our mama. Today is her birthday. She’s old.”
He bit his cheek at that piece of frank information and summoned a scowl. “These are my flowers. You should have asked me first.”
The older girl frowned. “Mrs. Jensen said they were her flowers. She said we could pick a few for Mama’s birthday.”
Mrs. Jensen was his dour, taciturn landlady, who had yet to unbend enough to smile at him since he moved in.
She owned the house next door, too, he remembered, a virtual match to his small, wood-sided cottage on this row of old dwellings that traced their existence back to the days when Park City was a rough and rugged mining camp, not a high-society resort town.
He had found it odd that Ruth Jensen had surrounded his cottage with this lush, fairy-tale garden while leaving its twin to sit squarely in a bare yard of crab grass and empty flowerbeds but she explained that she’d only recently purchased the house next door and hadn’t had time for landscaping yet.
In the last few days, he’d noticed the first signs of life over there—lights on at night, an older model Honda parked out front, a few toys in the yard. Looks like he was meeting some of his new neighbors.
“You’re sure Mrs. Jensen said you could pick the flowers?” He had a tough time picturing her giving these little urchins free rein to romp through her beloved garden, but the older girl nodded vigorously.
“She said it would be all right just this once since today is Mama’s birthday.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She’s still asleep. We’re gonna s’prise her.”
Their mother ought to be a little more aware of what her two girls were up to. She ought to at least put better locks on the door or something so they couldn’t go wandering around town on their own.
“What about your dad?”
The older girl sent him a sad look. “Our daddy’s in heaven. We miss him a lot.”
Now what was he supposed to say to that? At a loss, Gage glanced up and down the street. The three of them were the only thing moving through the early morning except for a few songbirds flitting through the trees and a plump striped cat skulking across a yard.
This was a quiet neighborhood, but he knew that wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to a child predator looking for prey. Quiet neighborhoods in small towns were often more attractive hunting grounds than those that bustled with people. Parents could more easily be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking nothing could touch them here, that their children faced no threat more serious than the occasional skinned knee from crashing on their bikes.
But no place was truly safe. He knew that far better than most.
“My name’s Gaby and my sister’s name is Anna,” the little girl confided into the silence. “I’m five years old but Anna’s only three. She doesn’t talk very much, but Mama says I talk enough for both of us so that’s okay. My real name’s Gabriella but Mama calls me Gaby because she says that’s what I am. What’s your name, mister?”
Their mother needed to have a serious talk with them about stranger danger. This little chatterbox had just handed him all the information anyone needed to earn their trust.
“McKinnon.”
“You’re nice, Mr. McKinnon.”
“Uh, thanks.” Not too many people said that about him. He wasn’t sure he liked it. “You two ought to go on inside now. I think you’ve got enough flowers, don’t you? And pretty soon your mother will wake up and start looking for you.”
“Okay. Anna’s feet are cold. This grass is wet and icky.”
“That’s what shoes are for,” he pointed out.
Gabriella just giggled and even Anna gave him a shy smile, then they raced across the yard to the house next door. The older girl paused on the porch and waved at him, then they both slipped inside.
He watched to make sure they closed the door tightly behind them, then took off down the street toward the trailhead he’d discovered a few weeks before.
He ought to definitely have a talk with the mother, warn her about letting two cute little girls roam free where any kind of sick bastard could get to them.
He could tell her stories that would give the lady nightmares for the rest of her life. After ten years in the FBI’s CAC division—Crimes Against Children—he had plenty of them to share. Hell, he didn’t even have to dig into any of the cases he had worked over the years to scare her senseless. All he had to do was tell her about Charlotte.
He reached the trailhead and ran up the steep dirt trail faster than his usual pace, grateful for the physical exertion to take his mind off the sudden, searing memory of his little sister’s cherubic face.
If he bumped into the girls’ mother, he would warn her to be a little more careful with her daughters’ safety, but he probably wouldn’t go into details about either his cases at the FBI or about Charlotte, Gage thought, pushing himself even harder up the trail.
He wouldn’t wish his kind of nightmares on anyone, even a woman who would let her daughters wander around at all hours of the morning.
* * *
On her twenty-eighth birthday, Alicia Connelly DeBarillas awoke to two horrifying realizations—she had slept through her alarm again and her daughters were standing by her bed holding two gigantic armloads of what had to be stolen flowers.
Allie groaned and propped herself up against the pillows, wishing she could hang on to the lingering remnants of yet another dream where the heartrending events of the past two years—particularly the last six months—had never happened. But like all her other dreams, this one fluttered away like dandelion puffs on the breeze.
“Hey, ladybugs.” She paused and cleared morning gruffness from her throat. “Where did you get those?”
“From the pretty flower house,” Gabriella answered with her sweetest smile. “Mrs. Jensen said we could pick some for your birthday.”
She supposed she shouldn’t find that so surprising. Mrs. Jensen might look cold and forbidding on the surface but she had treated Allie and her girls with nothing but kindness since the day Allie had met her the week before at the garage Ruth’s son owned.
She had become their guardian angel of sorts, the best of Samaritans. Allie had been desperate and frightened and so tired when she showed up at that garage just before closing with her car that suddenly wouldn’t drive any faster than thirty miles an hour.
She had been trying to figure out whether she dared dip into her dwindling nest egg to fix the Honda—and to pay for a hotel room in this exclusive resort town—when Ruth had arrived to drop something off for her son. The older woman had taken one look at Allie trying to keep the girls entertained in that oil-stained mechanic’s office through her exhaustion and fear and had for some unaccountable reason decided to take them all under her considerable wing.
Before Allie realized what happened, she had a job offer cleaning houses and a place to live in this small cottage.
She owed Ruth Jensen so much. The woman didn’t know it but she had rescued them, given Allie the time and space she needed so desperately to figure out where to go from here.
Now it looked as if she owed Ruth for her lovely mish-mashed birthday bouquet.
Anna smiled and held out her colorful armload to Allie. “Happy birthday, Mama,” she whispered.
Allie’s heart swelled at the rare words from her quiet daughter. She pulled the girls to her, flowers and all.
“Thank you! These are so beautiful.”
“We don’t have any money to buy you another present,” Gaby said sadly. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
She probably should have taken them shopping, Allie thought with a guilty pang. Just another one of the hazards of being a single mother. Until her daughters could handle money on their own, Allie had yet to figure out a way to deal with the whole present-buying experience when she was the recipient. It was a little hard for them to surprise her with a gift when she was the one paying for it.
“This is perfect, sweetheart. Absolutely perfect—exactly what I wanted. Let’s go put them in water so we can enjoy them for a long time. After I shower does anybody want some super-duper birthday pancakes with chocolate sprinkles?”
Both girls nodded vigorously, their dark eyes wide with excitement. Allie smiled and quickly picked up the robe she had tossed over the old carved oak chair next to her bed, then led the girls out of her room to the kitchen.
After Gaby found a couple of canning jars under the sink for the flowers and they had arranged the bouquets to everyone’s satisfaction, Allie sent them into the living room to watch cartoons while she checked her blood glucose.
It was exactly where it should be, but Allie was almost afraid to hope that things might be settling down. The last few months had been the best her levels had been in a long time. After Jaime’s death the stress and fatigue of finding herself alone with two young children had taken a heavy toll on her. No matter what she did, her insulin levels had fluctuated wildly, culminating in that terrible day she had ended up in the hospital.
As she showered, she thought about the year that had passed since her last birthday. Twelve months ago she never would have guessed she would find herself fleeing from everything safe and secure in her life—her job, their house, her friends. She never would have been able to even contemplate her desperate fight to keep her daughters.
She closed her eyes and let the water sluice over her. She had made the right choice. The only choice. What else could she have done? Jaime’s parents had been ruthlessly determined. Once they had been awarded joint custody, Allie realized it was only a matter of time before they found a way to take the girls back with them to Venezuela. They had the money and the resources to ensure she would never see them again.
She could hardly believe the warm, funny man she married and loved so fiercely could come from such cold resolve.
This was her second birthday without him.
One of those unexpected waves of loss washed over her and she clutched at her stomach. They didn’t come with the frequency they had the first year, when she had barely been able to function, when just surviving each day—wading painfully through the ocean of grief encircling her—had been a monumental struggle of sheer will.
Jaime had been killed in a car accident just a month after her twenty-sixth birthday, a few days shy of their fourth wedding anniversary. Gaby had been three, Anna just over a year.
Where would she be now if not for that drunk driver on that rainy Pennsylvania road? Comfortable and secure and happy in the lovely life she and Jaime were building together. Certainly not facing this uncertain future, on the run with two young girls who deserved far more.
Allie scrubbed her tears away, then turned off the shower and wrapped in a towel. She gazed at her reflection in the mirror over the sink, at the woman staring back at her with big eyes and a choppy brown dye job.
She wasn’t going to second-guess the choices she had made. This was her birthday, a day of celebration. She had her girls with her and that was all that mattered, the most wonderful gift she could ever need.
She still mourned her husband and always would, but over the past months the fierceness of it had faded from a raw, sucking chest wound to a slow ache in her heart.
She suddenly heard a knock at the bathroom door. “Mama,” Gaby chirped. “The nice man from the flower house came to see you.”
Ack! Allie gazed frantically around the bathroom. The only thing she had to wear in here was a worn, threadbare robe. Since visitors at the front door of the small cottage had a perfect view of the hallway and bathroom, there was no way to slip into her bedroom for something else to put on without the man seeing her.
Left with no choice, she threw on the robe and ran a comb through her hair, hoping the nice man from the flower house was a kind, elderly gentleman who wouldn’t notice her state of undress.
She hoped he wasn’t angry at the girls for picking the flowers. But technically the house and its lush flower beds belonged to Ruth and she had apparently given the girls permission to raid them. Allie wasn’t about to let some renter give them a hard time about it.
Prepared to defend her daughters, she tightened the sash on the robe and walked out of the bathroom.
Shock hit her hard in the stomach at the sight of the man standing by the front door.
Oh, mercy.
This was no kind, elderly gentleman.
The other nurses she used to work with would have said the man from the flower house looked very nice indeed, Allie had to admit. He looked to be in his midthirties, dressed in a smoke-colored suit, a crisp white dress shirt and a discreet navy tie. Beneath the suit, broad shoulders rippled with power and unyielding strength.
He was tall, well over six feet, with cool gray eyes and short-cropped dark hair that still looked damp, as if he had just stepped out of his own shower. A part of her mind registered that he smelled divine. Like soap and aftershave and just-washed male.
His strong, masculine features looked freshly shaved, and Allie was stunned by the sudden desire to run her fingers along the skin of that hard, tanned jawline.
Allie swallowed hard, disconcerted and a little frightened by the unwelcome tug of awareness. She didn’t want to notice this man. She wanted to stay frozen forever in her grief for Jaime.
“Yes?” she said, uncomfortably aware her voice sounded cold, rude. It wasn’t his fault her unruly hormones suddenly decided to wake up after two years of suspended animation.
If her neighbor was surprised by her unwelcome tone, he quickly concealed it. “Hello. I live next door. Gage McKinnon.”
He waited for her to introduce herself and Allie scrambled for a moment to remember what she was supposed to say.
“Lisa Connors.” She finally supplied the alias she had practiced, derivations of both her first name and her maiden name. “I believe you’ve met my daughters. Gabriella and Anna.”
Since she hadn’t been able to figure out a convincing way to persuade the girls they all had to use pretend names for a while, she had made the difficult decision to stick with their real names while they were on the run, risky though it might be.
“Yes. They were in my yard earlier. Actually, that’s why I stopped by.”
“Oh?” she said coolly. If he was going to yell at her daughters, she wasn’t going to make it easy for him.
A muscle flexed in that strong jaw and he met her hostile gaze without a flinch. “I just wanted to give you a friendly warning to be a little more careful with them.”
“Excuse me?” She stared at him.
“Your girls were outside alone in the neighborhood when it was barely daylight and not another soul was around.”
“You were, apparently.”
“Right. I was a complete stranger, but they had no problem striking up a conversation with me and telling me all kinds of details about their life. Their names, their ages, the fact that today is your birthday. That their father is dead. I know practically their life story.”
Oh, no. Allie fought the urge to press a hand to her suddenly queasy stomach. Gaby could talk the bark off a tree. Her sweet, openhearted daughter simply didn’t understand the meaning of discretion and Allie didn’t know how to teach her.
If she didn’t figure out a way, though, Gaby was going to someday let slip too much information to the wrong person, details that would identify her mother as a fugitive.
The girls thought they were simply off on a new adventure. Allie didn’t want to frighten them by telling them this was all so deadly serious.
She turned back to the neighbor to whom Gaby had revealed so much. “All fascinating information, I’m sure.”
He glanced over at the girls, engrossed in Sesame Street, then lowered his voice. “If I were some kind of child predator it would be very fascinating information. Once I had their names, it wouldn’t take me long to completely win their trust. You should have a talk with them. Warn them to be a little more careful. In my opinion, girls that young shouldn’t be wandering the neighborhood by themselves. You should never have let them outside without supervision.”
“I was asleep!” she exclaimed.
“All the more reason to be concerned. Anything could have happened and you would have awakened to find your daughters gone.”
“I can take care of my daughters, Mr. McKinnon.”
“I never said you couldn’t. I’m just bringing it to your attention. A mother who cares about her children’s safety can’t be too careful.”
If you go into insulin shock again, anything could happen to those girls. A fragment of testimony from the custody battle slithered through her mind in a nasty whisper. Look what happened last time. You were behind the wheel and nearly killed them all.
If you love our granddaughters at all, you must see that your condition makes you incapable of caring for them on your own.
Oh, how those words had hurt. Irena and Joaquin had gouged at her mercilessly, again and again until even she had almost been convinced she was an unfit mother.
She had taken it from them in that courtroom—she’d had no choice—but she was not about to listen to the same kind of accusations from a stranger, even one who looked like sin and smelled like heaven.
She lifted her chin. “My children’s safety is my own concern, Mr. McKinnon. I’ll thank you to mind your own business.”
His mouth tightened into a hard line. “This is my business.”
He reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out a flat black leather case. He opened it and thrust it at her and Allie’s anger changed instantly to a terrible, icy dread at the sight of the shimmering gold badge pinned inside.
Please, no. Somehow he had found her and now she would lose everything. She waited for him to break out handcuffs, but he only reached for the doorknob.
“I work for the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office, Mrs. Connors,” he said, his voice distant and cool. “I see hideous things done to children on a daily basis. You have two beautiful little girls. I would hate to see anything happen to them.”
With that, he opened the door and walked out into the summer morning, leaving Allie staring after him with bewildered fear still pulsing through her in steady, unrelenting waves.