Authors: Delores Fossen
“What about your personal relationships?” Cooper asked. “Maybe your ex wanted to make trouble for you?”
Jessa felt the heat rise in her cheeks. Cooper knew. Of course he did. He had access to police records from all over the state. He would have seen the report that she’d filed when her ex-husband, Rick Bolton, had beaten her. Maybe Cooper had even seen the bloody and bruised photos taken of her so he could be arrested for assault and battery.
“My ex hasn’t been in touch with me for nearly three years,” she settled for saying. “I’m not even sure where he is.”
She braced herself for Cooper’s argument. That Rick could have decided to get even with her for the eight months he’d spent in jail. But no argument—Cooper’s eyes met hers for just a moment before they darted away. In that second of time, she thought maybe she’d seen some sympathy.
But she had to be wrong about that.
He was still too enraged about her bringing Jewell back to Sweetwater Springs and therefore back into his life.
“Where’d your lawyer get Liam?” Cooper asked.
They were back to the illegal adoption theory, and while it was a definite sore point, it was something she, too, wanted to know. It wouldn’t help if she just buried her head in the sand.
“It was a private adoption, but let me call Hector now and find out.”
She stepped away from Cooper before she could hear any reason he might have for her not doing that. But he didn’t object. Instead, when she took her phone from her pocket and pressed Hector’s number, Cooper just stayed in the doorway, looking at Liam.
“He’s not yours,” Jessa insisted. “If he were, I’d know it. I’d feel it in my heart.”
It was a stupid argument. One that clearly didn’t convince Cooper. He just made one of those annoying sounds that could have meant anything. Jessa didn’t get a chance to continue the one-sided disagreement, because Hector answered.
“Jessa,” he greeted. “I heard about your car accident. Are Liam and you all right?”
It seemed the right thing to ask, but Jessa’s nerves were too close to the surface for her to take anything at face value. “We’re fine, but that’s not why I’m calling. I need to know what you learned about Liam’s birth parents.”
“Nothing,” Hector readily admitted. “Look, I’ve been trying, but the birth mother was adamant about this being a closed adoption. She left no contact information whatsoever.”
That wasn’t unusual. Often a teen mother would close that door of contact as her way of moving on and detaching herself from the child.
“What adoption agency did you use?” Jessa pressed.
Hector hesitated. It wasn’t a pause. Jessa could feel the difference, but she prayed she was wrong. She didn’t want any hesitations when he came to this.
“No agency,” Hector finally said. “The woman I used is more or less a broker, and she’s got a good reputation for her placements.”
Jessa was listening to every word, but she lost her focus when Cooper went into the room with Liam. She went after him.
“Birth mothers who want to do private adoptions contact this broker,” Hector continued, “and she in turn contacts the attorneys of prospective birth parents who are willing to pay medical bills and maybe even give compensation. Like you did.”
She had. A total payment of nearly fifty thousand dollars, which was almost every bit of the inheritance she’d gotten when her father died six years earlier. Jessa would have paid a heck of a lot more than that. But again, that wasn’t what had her attention now. Cooper had it. And she found him right by the crib, staring down at Liam.
Then she saw something else.
Cooper smiled.
The corner of his mouth lifted, the simple gesture flickering the muscle in his jaw. It was short-lived when his gaze landed on the bandage across Liam’s stomach. The incision beneath it was already healing, but the bandage was a reminder that she’d come close to losing him.
“Jessa?” Hector said. “Did you hear me?”
No. She hadn’t. “I’m sorry, this is a bad connection,” Jessa lied.
“I said in our case, the broker contacted me because she’d heard through mutual friends that you wanted to adopt a newborn.”
It all sounded reasonable. So reasonable that it might even appease Cooper.
“What’s the broker’s name?” Jessa asked. Best to finish this conversation fast so she could maneuver Cooper out of the room and away from Liam.
But Hector didn’t do much to finish things. His hesitation lasted a lot longer than the first one. “Her name is Peggy Dawes, but please don’t contact her. She prefers not to deal directly with the adoptive parents.”
Tough. This broker would deal with her. “I need her phone number. Before you say no, it’s important. Yesterday someone tried to kidnap my baby, and I want to know why.”
“Good God. And you think Peggy has answers about that?” He didn’t wait for her to respond. “She won’t. Heavens, Jessa. How could you think that? Peggy did you a great service by locating a baby for you, and you can’t go around questioning—”
“I’ll thank her,” Jessa interrupted. “Now give me her phone number.”
The seconds crawled by before she heard some rustling on the other end of the line and then Hector rattled off the number. Jessa made a note of it on her phone’s notepad.
“Thanks,” Jessa mumbled.
“Don’t thank me. I’ll keep looking for info on Liam’s birth parents, but I’m not doing you any favors by giving you Peggy’s number.”
Jessa froze. “What do you mean?” But she was talking to the air because Hector had already hung up.
“Anything wrong?” Cooper asked.
He’d no doubt seen the concern on her face, but Jessa shook her head and showed him the number she’d taken down. “It’s for Peggy Dawes, the baby broker my attorney used. Hector is still looking for information about Liam’s birth parents.”
Cooper nodded and pressed in Peggy’s numbers on his phone’s keypad.
“No!” Jessa insisted. “I don’t want you to call her. I’ll do it. I don’t want her to think she’s under investigation or something.”
“She
is
under investigation,” Cooper fired back, and he would have pressed the call button if Jessa hadn’t caught his hand to stop him.
Jessa was about to launch into another argument, but the sound stopped both of them. Not a gunshot or some other nightmarish noise.
Liam stirred. “Mama.” And he reached for her.
That got her hand off Cooper, and she shoved her phone into her pocket so she could gently lift Liam into her arms. He showed no signs whatsoever of being in pain, though he did point to his bandage. “Got boo-boo.”
And then his attention went to Cooper.
Liam eyed him as if sizing him up, but then his attention landed on the shiny badge and rodeo buckle. “Up.” Liam reached out for Cooper to take him.
It felt as if someone had punched her. Jessa didn’t want her baby in the arms of the man who might try to take him away from her.
But that was exactly what Cooper did.
He eased his hands around Liam and lifted him into his arms. Liam didn’t try to inspect the shiny things that had caused him to reach for Cooper. Her son just studied him.
Then Liam smiled.
Cooper closed his eyes a moment, and she could almost see the painful memories tightening the muscles in his face. Heaven knew how much he’d grieved when he’d lost his son in that flood. Jessa suddenly knew how painful that would have been, because she was feeling a little of it now.
God, she couldn’t lose him.
Wouldn’t.
Because she refused to believe Cooper had any kind of claim on the child she loved more than life itself.
Cooper’s phone buzzed, and he hesitated as if deciding whether to answer it. He had no choice, of course, because it could be about the investigation, but it meant handing Liam back to her so he could answer it.
“It’s Colt,” he relayed to her, and he stepped away from the crib to take the call. He didn’t put it on speaker, and Jessa couldn’t hear what Colt was saying, but she prayed it wasn’t more bad news.
She watched, waited and kept Liam close.
“Yeah, I heard you,” Cooper said to his brother. “No, I’ll handle it. I’ll talk to her.”
Mercy, that didn’t sound good.
“We have IDs on the gunmen,” Cooper explained the moment he ended the call.
Jessa was afraid to feel any real relief, but that was a start. Cooper had already said if he had names, he could begin to look for connections.
“The surviving one is Vernon Graham,” Cooper went on. “He’s awake and says he wants you to offer him a plea deal for a lighter sentence.”
“What will he give us in return?” Jessa asked, and she was almost afraid to hear the answer. So far, nothing about this situation was good.
Cooper paused a heartbeat, his gaze fastening to hers. “Graham says he’ll tell us the name of the person who hired him to kidnap Liam.”
Chapter Six
“You don’t have to do this,” Cooper reminded Jessa one more time. “In fact, I’d rather you didn’t.”
She shot him a glare, kept her arms folded over her chest and continued to stare out his truck window at the passing countryside. “I want to hear what this woman has to say,” Jessa mumbled.
This woman
was Peggy Dawes.
Vernon Graham had given them Peggy’s name as part of a plea deal. Judging from Jessa’s scowl and body language, she wasn’t pleased about the gunman’s revelation that Peggy was the one who’d hired him to kidnap Liam. And there was a good reason for Jessa’s anger.
It meant the kidnapping attempt was linked to the adoption. And it also could mean the whole adoption deal had been illegal.
But now Cooper was the one to snarl.
If Liam was indeed his son, then how the heck had Peggy gotten her hands on him?
Unfortunately, he could think of a few scenarios that tightened the knot in his gut. Maybe Peggy or one of her baby-brokering henchmen had caused his wife to be swept away in the flood. Or it could have gone in a different direction and Peggy merely could have found Liam. Of course, that led him to the next question of why she hadn’t just called the cops and reported it.
There was also another possible conclusion.
Maybe the gunman had out-and-out lied.
That also didn’t help with the knot, because it still meant this was somehow connected to the adoption. After all, how else would the gunman have known the woman’s name?
He would soon know the answer to that, since he was headed out to Peggy’s San Antonio house to have a little chat with her. Cooper had considered just hauling her into the sheriff’s office for questioning, but the woman didn’t have even a parking ticket, much less a criminal record. Also, other than the accusations of would-be kidnappers, there were no flags to indicate she was doing anything illegal. Heck, he couldn’t even find a connection between her and the gunman, Graham, who’d accused her of wrongdoing.
Well, he couldn’t find the connection yet, anyway.
But if either Graham or Peggy confessed to anything, Cooper would be making an arrest today. That was why he’d wanted his brother along.
Jessa’s phone buzzed, and she snatched it up and put it to her ear, but not before Cooper saw that the call was from her mother. “Is something wrong?” Jessa immediately asked the caller.
“No, everything’s fine,” he heard Linda say.
Thankfully, Jessa and he were close enough that he had no trouble hearing the conversation. He’d taken precautions when Jessa had said she’d be going with him to see Peggy. Cooper had put all the ranch hands on alert, and Tucker was standing guard. Rayanne was also in the house, but he hadn’t even bothered to ask her to help. Unlike Rosalie, Rayanne didn’t seem to be the helping sort.
Still, there were plenty of things that could go wrong that didn’t involve security, so Cooper listened carefully to what Linda had to say.
“I just wanted you to know that Dr. Howland was here to check on Liam, and he said he was doing great,” Linda explained. “He didn’t feel there was any need to move him back to the hospital as long as Rosalie continues to change and check the bandage.”
Jessa huffed softly. And Cooper knew why. It meant she’d have to stay at the ranch. Of course, she could just hire another nurse and leave, and Cooper figured Jessa was already working on that.
He was working on making her stay.
Until the DNA results came back, Cooper wanted Liam under the McKinnon roof. And after he had the results... Well, he’d deal with that when and if the time came.
“Thanks, Mom,” Jessa said. “Give Liam a kiss for me.”
Jessa put her phone away and continued to look out the window. Cooper did his own share of looking, too. First to make sure they weren’t being followed by anyone but Colt, who was driving behind them in his truck.
But Cooper also looked at Jessa.
No matter how many times he told his eyes to stay off her, they didn’t listen. Partly because of the worry and fear still on her face. Partly because he shared the same concern about Liam’s safety as she did.
However, it was her jeans and snug red top that were giving him the most trouble.
There was nothing particularly special about the items of clothing, except they looked damn good on her. Hugging her curves. Making him well aware that beneath her A.D.A. facade, there was a red-blooded woman.
One who stirred his own blood.
And that couldn’t happen.
Hell.
He wasn’t in any position to start a relationship, especially with a woman who thought he was lower than grit on a horse’s hoof. And besides, he had to focus on getting things straight with this adoption and the attack. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to keep him busy.
“You keep looking at me,” she grumbled.
Yeah, he did. “It’s nothing personal,” Cooper said, and then silently cursed. Obviously, her jeans had also rendered him stupid.
Because a man gawking at a woman was indeed personal.
“I meant it doesn’t mean anything,” he corrected. “It’s just you look, well, different. Sort of naked without one of your suits.”
What he should have done was just shut the heck up instead of babbling like an idiot.
Her eyebrow slid up. “Naked?”