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Say what? That still didn’t make a lick of sense.
“Where are these men?” Sawyer went on full alert, his gaze firing all around the grounds. And it was a lot of ground to cover. What didn’t help was there were guests coming and going, and there were vehicles parked everywhere.
“I don’t know.” Cassidy’s eyes were wild, a different kind of storm brewing there, and every muscle in her body was rock hard.
Sawyer got right in her face. “The sooner you answer me, the sooner I can help. Where are these men, and where are you supposed to meet them?”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “They said they’d call me in thirty minutes and tell me where to drop off the photo. It’s already past the time.” Her voice broke, and a hoarse sob tore from her throat.
Okay. He could add sheer terror to her panic. That wasn’t helping his own reactions, and while Sawyer wanted to know if this child was his, he needed to figure out if any danger was imminent.
“So, you don’t know who the men are?” Not sure he believed that, but he pressed for details. He figured the devil was in those. “How’d you meet them?”
“I didn’t meet them. They kidnapped me two days ago and have been holding me blindfolded.”
All right. So, there had been a crime, and he believed her—about that anyway. It was hard to fake that kind of body language, the broken breath and the sob.
But he immediately rethought that.
This was Cassidy, and she’d lied to him before. In fact, it was the reason their very brief affair had ended. And it was that reminder that caused his stomach to start churning.
“Does this have anything to do with your brother?” he asked. Except Sawyer didn’t just ask. He demanded it.
She swallowed hard. Nodded. “Yes.” It was one of the first direct answers she’d given him since her arrival, and it wasn’t a good time for it.
“Bennie’s behind this,” Sawyer grumbled, and he would have cursed some more, but he didn’t want to do that in front of the baby.
Bennie, her low-life, scheming younger brother. There were about a hundred more labels he could have slapped on the idiot, but the bottom line was that Bennie was really bad news. Always one step ahead of the law and the crooks that he dealt with. And big sis, Cassidy, was always there to bail him out.
But if the baby was Sawyer’s, then why the heck was Bennie involved?
He didn’t have an answer to that, either. Yet.
Cassidy’s phone rang, the sound shooting through his thoughts. He didn’t have to tell her to answer it. Bobbling the baby in her arms, Cassidy fumbled to press the answer button. Sawyer hadn’t really planned on it, but he took the child so Cassidy wouldn’t drop her, and he waited. The first thing he saw was the blocked caller ID on the screen.
Not a good sign.
Even though his entire focus should have been on the call, he glanced down at the baby again. Soon, very soon, he’d have to know the truth about her paternity. For now, he pressed the speaker button on Cassidy’s phone so he could hear what the caller was saying.
“You got the picture?” the man on the phone growled.
“I’m getting it,” Cassidy assured him. “What about my brother? Where is he? How is he?”
“You’ll get to see him as soon as you bring us back that picture.”
Sawyer huffed. “Genius, she wants proof that her brother’s still alive,” he spelled out to the person on the other end of the line. He didn’t bother to take the sarcasm out of his voice, either. “Now, here’s the part where you provide that proof, or this conversation ends.”
Silence. For a long time.
Grabbing on to his jacket sleeve, Cassidy frantically shook her head. Probably because she wanted him to stay quiet.
Sawyer ignored that.
In the next couple of minutes, he was going to have to ignore a lot of head-shaking and just about anything that she was saying. Because there was no way he was going to let her leave to face these kidnappers alone—no matter how much proof of life they provided.
There was some mumbling and cussing on the other end of the line. “Here he is,” the man snapped, and the phone dinged, indicating there was a message.
Cassidy hit the button, and a moment later the video loaded. There was Bennie, all right. His hands were tied with a rope to what appeared to be wooden beams on a ceiling. He was stretched out like a moth in a science experiment.
“Oh, God.” Cassidy pressed her fingers to her mouth, but she didn’t manage to silence the gasp. “You’ve hurt him.”
Sawyer had to agree with her on that point. His face was bloody and bruised, as if he’d taken a good beating. His hair was matted, maybe with more blood, and even though he was moving and mumbling, he looked like a man on the verge of losing consciousness.
Or dying.
“Why are they doing this to you?” Sawyer asked Bennie.
But just like that, the video ended. “That’s all the proof you’ll get. Now, it’s your turn. Get that photo here,” the caller demanded. “You got thirty minutes, or we finish him off.”
“Why?” Sawyer repeated. He needed to keep them talking. Needed to find out their location and anything else he could learn about them. He spotted his cousin, Sheriff Grayson Ryland, in the doorway of the barn, and Sawyer motioned for him to come over.
But Grayson had barely made it a step when there was a flash of light. Since his body was on full alert, it took Sawyer a second to realize that it had come from the camera.
Cassidy had snapped his picture.
With the baby.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and Cassidy took off running.
Chapter Two
Cassidy didn’t look back, but she could hear Sawyer cursing at her and shouting for her to stop. A moment later, she heard more than just his voice.
She heard footsteps. Someone running. And she had no doubt that it was Sawyer coming after her.
Her heart was past the racing stage now. Breath, too. And her hands were shaking so hard that she was surprised and relieved when she managed to open the truck door. She jumped in and immediately threw the gear into Reverse. She had to get out of there now and get the photo back to those men.
The images of her brother’s battered face flew through her head. Images of the shock on Sawyer’s face, too, when she’d handed him the baby. Later, if there was a later, she’d need to deal with him.
Except later came a lot sooner than she’d planned.
She felt the thud and looked into the rearview mirror to see that Sawyer had jumped into the truck bed.
Mercy.
She didn’t need this.
He no longer had the baby. He’d obviously handed the newborn off to the other man who’d been approaching them when Cassidy had snapped the picture. And now that Sawyer’s hands were free, he was making his way from the back of the truck bed and toward her. If looks could kill, that glare he shot her would have hurtled her to the hereafter.
Still, Cassidy didn’t stop. In fact, she slammed her foot on the accelerator and threaded the truck through the sea of other vehicles. Not the best time to attempt something like this with all the partygoers around, but she hadn’t exactly had a choice.
She didn’t want to hurt Sawyer, but she couldn’t have him go to the kidnappers with her, either. Earlier, they’d warned her if she didn’t return alone, her brother would die. That couldn’t happen. She couldn’t lose Bennie.
The moment that she was in a small clearing, Cassidy jerked the steering wheel to the right to try to toss Sawyer off the back. It didn’t work. He held on, and it only made his glare a whole lot worse. Still, she tried again.
Again, no luck.
Sawyer held on, bouncing around on the metal surface of the truck bed. He managed to hang on to his gun, and she was afraid he might use it on her if he got the chance. He already hated her, and this certainly wasn’t going to make things better between them.
Cassidy sped across the driveway that coiled around the sprawling main house and the barns, and she finally reached the ranch road that would take her to the highway. She’d lied when she told Sawyer she didn’t know where the kidnappers were.
A necessary lie.
If he had learned their location, he’d just go in there with guns blazing, and Bennie would be caught in the middle of a firefight. Of course, that might still happen if she couldn’t ditch Sawyer before she made it to the abandoned building where they were holding her brother.
Cassidy tried again to toss him from the truck, but she failed that time, too. Sawyer not only held on, he made his way toward her. Inch by inch.
There was a small slider window that separated them. Not nearly big enough for him to crawl through, and it had a lock that would prevent anyone on the outside from opening it. Thank goodness. Still, that didn’t solve her problem of getting rid of him.
She was already going too fast, and as if fate and Mother Nature were working against her, the drizzle turned to a hard rain, making the road even more slick than it already was. Cassidy tried to focus on her driving. On ditching Sawyer. And getting this photo to the kidnappers.
But Sawyer obviously had other ideas about the ditching part.
He lifted his gun, took aim. Not at her. He aimed the barrel of his gun at the passenger’s window.
“No!” Cassidy shouted.
Too late.
He turned his head and fired, the shot blasting through not just both windows—the side and back—but the sound seemed to rip through her, too. Her heart slammed against her ribs, and she hit the brakes. Not the best idea she’d ever had, but it was hard to make a good decision with the pain from the noise crashing through her ears and head.
The truck tires fishtailed on the wet asphalt, slinging Sawyer and her around. Even though she was wearing her seat belt, her shoulder slammed so hard into her door that she swore she saw stars. She certainly lost her breath.
Unlike Sawyer.
The truck hadn’t even come to a full stop yet when he reached through the gaping hole in the safety glass on the passenger’s side and unlocked the door. Opened it. As if it were a routine maneuver for him, he slid from the truck bed and into the cab.
He put his gun to her head.
“You will tell me what’s going on now,” he growled. His glare was even worse, and the tendons in his neck corded.
“I’ve already told you all I know.” She tried to sound tough as nails, like him. And she failed miserably. She wasn’t tough. She was terrified, exhausted and just wanted this ordeal to end. “Now, get out.”
“Not gonna happen.”
There it was. That smart mouth that she used to think was funny and a complement to his bad-boy persona. It had been the very thing that had lured her to him. But his mouth and his tenacity weren’t much of a lure now. Nothing was.
Well, except for that brief slap of attraction she’d felt when she first saw him in the barn.
That slap might have to be a real one that she delivered to herself, because an attraction to Sawyer should be the last thing on her mind.
“They’ll kill Bennie if you’re with me,” she reminded him. Somehow, she got the truck moving again because like everything else, time wasn’t working in her favor.
He shook his head, cursed her again and slung the water off his face. It didn’t help. The rain coming in from the window just walloped him once more, soaking his jacket, white shirt and jeans. His hair, too. The drops of water slid off those dark brown strands and dripped onto his face.
“Who says they won’t just kill you when you give them the photo?” he asked. “You should have taken this to the cops and not tried to handle it yourself.”
“I didn’t go to the cops because they said they’d kill Bennie.”
“Kidnappers always say that,” he snapped. “And they always tell the mark to cooperate and that you’ll get your loved one back in one piece. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. But they could just as easily put a bullet in you as Bennie.”
Obviously, he thought she was stupid.
“They won’t do that because I haven’t given them all the ransom money yet, that’s why. The other half won’t be transferred to their account until Bennie and I are away from the pick-up site. And I’m the only one with the bank account information. If they kill me, they don’t get the other half million.”
He mumbled something she didn’t catch. “You’re paying a million dollarsʼ ransom for your brother?”
“You’d do the same for your brother.”
“Yeah. Because he’s a good guy and not some low-life weasel. What’d Bennie do this time to get himself in this mess?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice cracked, and she could feel what little composure she had cracking, too. “At this point, it doesn’t matter. Bennie’s the only family I have, and I’ll give them every penny I own to get him back.”
And while a million wasn’t every penny she owned, it was close. It would wipe her out financially, but there was no way she could live with herself if she hadn’t agreed to the kidnappersʼ every demand.
Including that photo.
“Is the baby yours?” she asked. Cassidy took the turn too fast toward the town of Silver Creek, and the tires squealed on the road.
“I don’t know,” Sawyer said after several long moments. He slung off more water, swiveled in the seat and looked around.
“You don’t know if you had sex with a woman about ten months ago?” Cassidy pressed.
Yes, she sounded irked about that. And was. She’d always been attracted to the bad-boy types, but it never felt good to know that she was in a mountain-high pile of women that Sawyer had discarded.
Even if she’d contributed a lot to the reason he’d discarded her.
“There’s someone,” he admitted. “I’ll call her as soon as I’m finished with this. But I’m pretty sure if she’d gotten pregnant, she would have told me.” And he took out his phone. “I’m calling my cousin, the sheriff.”
“No!” Even though she had to take one of her hands off the steering wheel, Cassidy did it so she could grab his phone. “No cops. No anyone but me.”
He leaned in, a major violation of her personal space. So close she could smell wedding cake on his breath. “I’m going to the drop site with you. Close your mouth,” he added when she opened it. “Because arguing won’t help. You’re taking me to those kidnappers so I can find out why they want the photo. And why they took Bennie.”
Sawyer fired off a text message. Probably requesting backup that could make this mess a thousand times worse.
“I could stop the truck and refuse to go there,” she lied.
And the flat look Sawyer gave her with those blistering blue eyes let her know that he, too, knew she was lying.
