This probably wasn’t good news. And it wasn’t short and sweet, either. It had an attachment. Grayson started by saying the reason he didn’t call was because he hadn’t wanted to wake Jaycee in case she was sleeping.
But there was a lot more than that in the message.
“You know the name Bryson Hillard?” Josh asked, reading through it.
Jaycee repeated the name, shook her head. “Never heard of him. Why?”
“The tech found his name on the laptop they recovered from the house.”
Another headshake. “Who is he?”
“A wealthy San Antonio businessman. No criminal record. Grayson plans to bring him in for questioning first thing in the morning.”
“I want to be there,” she insisted.
Josh didn’t try to talk her out of it. Heck, he wanted to be there, too. Because this was personal now. The idiot responsible had put his unborn child and countless others in danger, and if this Bryson Hillard had anything to do with it, Josh wanted to know. And
confront
him.
He scrolled through the rest of the email, and the reading came to a jarring halt when he saw the last sentence.
Hell.
He repeated the mental profanity when he opened the attachment.
“Once I take a nap,” Jaycee said, obviously not noticing his change of expression, “I’ll make some calls and find another place to stay.”
Josh finished reading the message before he went to the window and closed the blinds.
When he turned around, Jaycee was waiting, her mouth slightly open, and she had a white-knuckle grip on the bed post. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Josh debated how much he should tell her and decided she had to know the truth. “You can’t leave,” Josh told her. “You’ll have to stay here for the night, because those missing guards are looking for you. They left you a message nailed to the door of your old apartment.”
He walked closer and held up his phone for her to see the message that one of the deputies had photographed.
Jaycee’s gaze darted over the words, and she pressed her trembling fingers to her mouth. “Oh, God.”
Chapter Six
The images kept coming at Jaycee in the nightmare. Images of the explosion. Of their escape and the armed guards.
Especially of the women who hadn’t been lucky enough to get away.
When she could take no more of those brutal images, Jaycee forced herself to wake up, and she jackknifed to a sitting position.
And nearly smacked right into Josh.
He wasn’t in the sleeping bag on the floor, which was the last place she’d seen him before she dozed off. He was there right next to the bed, leaning over her. His hands were lifted as if he were about to give her a hug. But the look in his eyes was pure concern.
“I was about to wake you,” he said. “You were having a bad dream.”
Yes, and it’d been a doozy, no doubt spurred on by the message the guards had nailed to the apartment door. Just two little sentences, but it was the stuff of nightmares and a serious guilt trip.
Agent Finney, you sealed those women’s fates when you escaped. Thanks to you, they’ll all soon be dead.
It shouldn’t have surprised her that the kidnappers had addressed her as Agent Finney. She’d already learned that they knew who she was. It was the other part of the message that had caused the tightness in her chest. And the nightmares.
Thanks to you, they’ll all soon be dead.
She had no doubt that these men would kill in retaliation, but she prayed they wouldn’t harm the women until they’d delivered their babies. That would give Josh and her some time to find and rescue them.
“Any sign of the men or the hostages?” she asked, and Jaycee held her breath, waiting for Josh’s answer. She didn’t dare ask if any bodies had been found, because she wasn’t sure she could take the answer.
“None.” Josh put down his hands but didn’t move off the bed. He stayed right there, looming over her.
And he was naked.
Jaycee did a double take.
Okay, not naked. Just shirtless.
She had a good view of not just those toned abs and pecs but also the scar. It was several inches long and slashed across his otherwise perfect body. Even though it was well healed, she figured the ashy white line would never go away.
The memory of it certainly wouldn’t.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, following her gaze. “I was changing when I heard you call out my name.”
She had? Jaycee didn’t remember saying his name, but Josh had certainly been in the nightmare. This time, instead of getting her and the three other women to the truck, he’d been lying in a pool of blood.
Yes, definitely a nightmare.
She didn’t want to be the reason that he took another bullet, but it had come too close to happening yesterday. Too bad she couldn’t distance him from all of this, but she knew what his response would be if she even tried.
No way.
And she couldn’t blame him. If their situations had been reversed, she would have wanted to keep him close, too. To protect him from those note-leaving guards who seemed to enjoy tormenting them.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” he asked, examining her eyes, then her face.
His attention dropped lower, and that was when she realized the bulky T-shirt that he’d lent her had fallen off her shoulder to expose a lot of her left breast. And there was a lot more to her breasts these days, since the pregnancy had made them fuller.
Jaycee quickly fixed the shirt situation, and it was her turn to mumble that she was sorry. Not that Josh would have found her attractive anyway, what with her pregnant belly just beneath those fuller breasts.
But she immediately rethought that.
There was indeed some heat in his cool blue eyes. Of course, there’d always been heat between them. That wasn’t their problem. Their problem was the scar on his chest, and since she was responsible for that, it would always stand between them.
“Yeah,” he muttered as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. And he got up, went to the kitchen area and poured himself some coffee.
“Does it still hurt?” Jaycee asked. “The scar,” she clarified when he gave her a puzzled look.
“Sometimes. There was some muscle damage.” And with that tiny bit of info, he turned away. Everything in his body language indicated that the subject was off-limits.
Jaycee huffed, looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand. It was 7:00 a.m.
Good grief. Where had the time gone?
She’d fallen asleep shortly after eight, which meant she’d really racked up some serious snoozing time. Of course, this was the first morning in months that she hadn’t woken up as a captive.
Well, a real captive.
She certainly wasn’t a free woman, not as long as those men were at large. She’d essentially have to stay in hiding until they were caught. Or do something to catch them herself. Jaycee was leaning toward the latter, but she wasn’t sure how to go about that.
“I talked to your supervisor a little while ago,” Josh went on. “He officially put you on a leave of absence so we’d have time to sort this out. The FBI will assist with the investigation any way they can.”
“That’s good.” After the danger was over, she’d have a job waiting for her. One less thing to worry about.
“Grayson’s wife brought over some clothes and toiletries earlier,” Josh said, tipping his head to a small suitcase next to the door.
Jaycee hadn’t heard their visitor or Josh up and moving around, and that unnerved her. She had to be more vigilant. Had to do more to keep herself safe.
Starting with finding another place to stay.
She’d need to make some calls once she had washed up and changed. And Jaycee didn’t want to think about how Josh would react to her decision. Of course, he might be a little relieved. Having her under the same roof couldn’t be any easier for him than it was for her.
She got up, took the suitcase with the clothes and headed to the bathroom to shower and change into a loose yellow cotton maternity dress. In fact, all the clothes were maternity, but that shouldn’t have surprised her, either. Not with all the children she’d seen running around the ranch.
Josh was on the house phone when she came out of the bathroom. He quickly ended the call, but he’d no sooner done that when his cell rang. The sound shot through the room and caused her to gasp.
Get a grip.
She wasn’t the gasping type, and what she needed to settle her nerves was her gun and her badge. A little bit of normalcy might go a long way toward helping her get through the rest of this day.
“It’s Grayson,” Josh said, and he hit the speaker function on his phone. “Please tell me you have good news,” he said to his cousin.
“Some. Two of the women, Marita and Blanca, will be headed back home today. They’re sisters, and they said their family is very poor, and their father basically sold them to a man who said he wanted them to work as maids. Instead, he took them to the baby farm where they were inseminated.”
Josh’s grip tightened on his coffee cup. His mouth tightened, too. “Do the women know the fathers of their babies?”
“No. But they agreed to have an amniocentesis. That’s a procedure to test the amniotic fluid, and it’ll give us the DNA of the father. Or fathers, whatever the case might be. If he’s in the system, we could get a match.”
It was another long shot, but better than nothing. Besides, someone who would force women into surrogacy probably did have a police record.
“The other woman will be able to leave the hospital tomorrow,” Grayson went on. “Her ex fathered her child, so no need to do DNA tests. She was hiding from the guy. Had a restraining order on him, but he kept finding her and assaulting her. So she moved to San Antonio and was living under an alias when she was kidnapped and taken to the baby farm.”
“She won’t be going back to the ex, will she?” Jaycee asked.
“No. We’re relocating her to a different city.”
Good. If she’d been through anything like Jaycee had, then being rescued shouldn’t take her from the frying pan and into the fire.
“So she and the baby are okay?” Josh asked.
“Fine. The woman didn’t have a scratch on her.”
Somewhat of a miracle considering their escape, and it was a dose of good news that Jaycee needed. However, she could hea
r a “bad news” hesitatio
n in Grayson’s voice.
“Did the men leave me another message?” she came out and asked.
“Not that we’ve found.” He paused. “But we did find something else. The tech was able to recover some of the data on the laptop’s hard drive. A lot more than just Bryson Hillard’s name. It appears there are more baby farms. Maybe dozens of them scattered throughout the state.”
Oh, mercy.
It sickened her to think of all those women and their babies in danger.
“According to some emails on the hard drive,” Grayson continued, “the people behind this kidnapped pregnant women who wouldn’t be immediately missed. Homeless women, runaway teens or those without families.”
Like her.
Judging from what Jaycee had found out the night before, her supervisor had simply thought that she’d gone off the deep end because of Josh’s shooting and had taken a long leave of absence. She had gone off the deep end. But that hadn’t been the reason for her disappearance.
“How many women are we talking about?” Josh asked.
“Dozens at least. Not all came from Texas. Some were illegal immigrants or those on the run from the law, and some appear to have been forced into becoming surrogates like Marita and Blanca.”
Josh muttered some profanity. “And there were no missing persons reports filed on any of these women?”
“A few, but not enough for any law enforcement agency to connect the dots.”
Jaycee huffed, but she knew that unless there was a pattern, the FBI wouldn’t have picked up on it. “What about the people paying for the babies? Any info about them on the hard drive?”
Grayson made a sound of frustration. “They’re all listed by case numbers with no personal details. We can try to match the numbers with adoptions filed during that time, but I’m betting the people who paid for these babies didn’t file papers.”
Jaycee was betting the same thing. She took a deep breath before she asked the next question. “Were the birth mothers murdered?”
“Don’t know yet. We don’t have identities on the women. Well, with the exception of you and the ones who were rescued yesterday.”
She immediately thought of something. “What about the woman who was kidnapped the same time as me? She was at the Hawthorne Medical Center in San Antonio, so there should be a record of her name on the appointment schedule.”
“I’ll check and see what I can find,” Grayson assured her. “But since these people stole your badge, it’s possible you were their primary target all along.”
That sent a chill right through her. Heaven knows what these monsters had planned to do with her baby. And with her. But she figured they hadn’t had anything good in mind. Maybe they’d wanted to use the baby to force her into doing something illegal.
Maybe Josh, too.
Her baby could have become the ultimate bargaining tool, since there were a lot of things that two FBI agents could cover up or overlook in criminal investigations.
“We’ll keep digging,” Grayson added, and he ended the call.
Jaycee didn’t even try to hide her frustration. “That wasn’t the way I’d wanted to start the morning,” she mumbled.
“No,” Josh quietly agreed. “But at least we have a possible lead. If we get a DNA match from Blanca’s and Marita’s babies, then we can interrogate the birth father. Or fathers. They could help us find the person who honchoed this mess.”
Yes, it was a good lead, but it didn’t seem nearly enough considering all the lives that were at stake.
“Coffee?” he asked, raising his cup.
Jaycee shook her head because the smell made her a little queasy. “But I wouldn’t say no to some toast or milk. Or a doughnut.” She wasn’t hungry, but she should eat something for the sake of the baby.
His left eyebrow lifted. “A doughnut?”
“Yeah, I’ve been craving them in between the bouts of morning sickness.”
But her suddenly jittery stomach wasn’t a result of morning sickness. Probably more nerves than anything else. After all, Grayson had just told them some disturbing things.
Plus there was Josh.
Yet something else disturbing in a totally different way. She was in a very confined space with a shirtless man whom she’d always found attractive. His jeans didn’t help, either.
They were snug in all the right places.
And despite the fact that she was five months’ pregnant and coming down from a horrible ordeal, she felt the heat trickle through her.
Their gazes met.
Held.
And Josh gave a heavy sigh before he turned around and put two pieces of bread in the toaster. He also crossed the room, grabbed a shirt from the closet and put it on. It still didn’t help. Jaycee had a much too vivid memory of how he looked without it.
“Sorry, no doughnuts,” he said. “If it’d make you more comfortable, I repeat my offer—you can move to one of the guest rooms in the main house.”
“With all those people? No thanks. I can call some friends.” If she still had any, that is.
Josh stared at her. “FBI friends?”
Jaycee shrugged. Actually, she didn’t have a lot of friends in the FBI because she often worked alone and undercover for long stretches. That didn’t give her a lot of socializing time. Ironically, before the shooting, Josh had been her closest friend, and she doubted he’d now classify her as such.
“Look, you’ve already done so much,” she said, “and I don’t want to keep imposing on you.”
“It’s not an imposition.” His gaze dropped to her stomach. “And I’d rather be the one protecting you.”
A burst of air left her mouth. Not quite a laugh. “I’m a trained agent just like you. The kidnappers took my gun, but if you give me another one, I’ll be pretty good at protecting myself.”
Oh, no.
He got that mule-headed look. The one that let her know he wasn’t going to back down on this.
“You’re a
pregnant
trained agent.” Even though the toast popped up, Josh ignored it and walked closer to her. “I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but that baby changes everything.”