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Nowhere to Hide
RaeAnne Thayne
As an on-the-run single mother out to protect her little girls, Lisa Connors needed two things: money, and to keep her identity secret. But it was just her luck that the possibility of the former would threaten the latter–for as the caretaker of the hunk-next-door with two broken legs, her ability to keep her distance was already shaky.When she found out said hunk's profession–FBI agent–it was downright demolished….Gage McKinnon had spent most of his life trying to keep away from all things familial, so the last thing he needed was to have two adorable little girls take root next door. But it was their mother who posed his greatest threat. For in Lisa he felt that door in his heart–the one that had been slammed shut twenty-five years ago–start to open, just a crack.
“Was someone else injured in your accident?”
Gage gave a rough laugh. “A dozen other FBI agents and local cops were there. None was lucky enough to receive the same special attention. Why do you ask?”
Lisa shrugged. “While you were sleeping, I thought I heard you call out for someone named Charlie. I thought it might have been another agent who’d been hurt along with you.”
His expression went instantly cold, so cold she shivered, regretting whatever crazy impulse had led her to bring up the subject. “I must have been having a nightmare.”
She knew she should let it drop, but something made her push. “Is Charlie a friend?”
“Charlie was short for Charlotte.”
He went on, his face without expression, his eyes focused on the curtains fluttering in the night breeze. “Charlotte was my kid sister. She was kidnapped from our front yard when she was three years old. We never saw her again.”
Nowhere to Hide
RaeAnne Thayne
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
RAEANNE THAYNE
lives in a graceful old Victorian nestled in the rugged mountains of northern Utah, along with her husband and two young children. Her books have won numerous honors, including several Readers’ Choice Awards from Romantic Times and a RITA
Award nomination by the Romance Writers of America. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers. She can be reached through her Web site at www.raeannethayne.com or at P.O. Box 6682, North Logan, UT 84341.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
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.
