Holden Read online

She melted and forgot all about the gunshot. The pain. Heck, she forgot how to breathe.

  Nicky figured at any second he would come to his senses and stop this. He didn’t. The kiss raged on until she felt it in every part of her body. Until she was the one who was grappling to pull him closer.

  Until she was thinking that sex was a possibility.

  It wasn’t.

  Nicky repeated that to herself several times, but it didn’t sink in until Holden finally pulled back, and she could see the apology in his eyes. An apology that was about to make it to his mouth.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” she told him.

  He stared at her. A long time. “We don’t need this right now. Agreed?”

  She nodded. Easy to agree to that considering they’d just been attacked. “Will it help if we agree?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” he drawled. “Still, I have to try.”

  Nicky had to nod at that, too. They did have to try, but she figured they both knew they were failing big-time. They’d just made out in a hospital ER so there wasn’t much chance of resisting each other if they ever got some time alone. Thankfully, that probably wouldn’t happen anytime soon. Then, when this was over, she could stand back and assess whatever the heck she was going to do about these wildfire feelings she had for Holden.

  “You’re sure you’re up to seeing Amanda?” Holden asked.

  Good. They were moving on to something they should be doing. Even though her body disagreed with that.

  “Of course I want to see her.” That was possibly a lie, too. She wasn’t up to seeing anyone right now except Holden and Carter, but Amanda might tell Nicky things that she wouldn’t tell the cops.

  Holden stared at her as if trying to decide whether to call her on that lie or not. He didn’t. “This way,” he finally said, and he started with her down the hall.

  Nicky spotted two uniformed guards, one at each end, and she figured there were other guards and deputies posted around the building. The explosion had happened just yards from the entrance, and security was going to be tight.

  “Nothing on the dead guys yet. They had no IDs on them,” Holden said. “I got an update while you were getting a shot to numb your arm for the stitches.”

  Yes, she’d heard him just on the other side of the curtain, but Nicky hadn’t been able to make out much of the conversation.

  “Their prints should be in the system, though,” he added a moment later. “So, once Grayson has those, we’ll probably get a match.”

  Good. That was the first step in figuring out who hired them.

  But Holden wasn’t acting as if that was good news.

  “Is something wrong?” Nicky finally asked.

  “Your father found out about the attack. And he knew you’d been hurt. He called Grayson before you were even examined.”

  “How did he find out?” However, Nicky waved off the question. Waved and then flinched when she felt the pain in her arm. Obviously, the numbing meds were already wearing off.

  Holden noticed the flinch all right, she thought. He cursed. And the muscles in his jaw got very tight again. Best to get his focus back on the investigation rather than her injury.

  “What did my father say to Grayson?” she asked.

  That tightened his muscles even more. “Oscar says he’ll use this to get custody of the baby, that it’s not safe for Carter to be around you because someone’s trying to kill you.”

  Nicky wished she could argue with that, but it was true. Still, that didn’t mean her father should have the child.

  “Grayson’s going to call Oscar and tell him to back off, that the baby is in protective custody,” Holden added. “My protective custody.”

  She doubted that would get her father to back down even a little, but it was better than nothing. Plus, it was good to know they had Grayson on their side.

  “The safe house is ready,” Holden added. “I got a call about that, too.”

  Again, Holden didn’t make it sound as if that was good. Probably because they still had to get Carter there, and with the threat seemingly all around them, that might not be easy to do.

  “But we got some bad news on the blood that the CSIs found at the inn,” Holden explained a moment later. “No match.”

  Nicky shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense. Those men who attacked us almost certainly had records.” She froze. “Oh, God. You don’t think it could have belonged to a baby?”

  “No,” he said immediately. “There’s no evidence that there was another baby in that place. It probably just means we wounded the one gunman who wasn’t in the system.”

  Yeah, the odds were against that. Well, maybe. Maybe whoever was behind this hadn’t hired the usual thugs to do thug work.

  They continued to another hall, where Nicky saw yet another guard. This one was outside one of the hospital room doors, and as they got closer, she spotted Gage just inside the room. With Amanda and a tall lanky man. Her lawyer, no doubt.

  “The doctor decided to release her,” Gage volunteered. “She won’t be transferred to another hospital after all.”

  Amanda was dressed not in a gown but in regular clothes, and she was sitting on the edge of the bed. “As soon as the paperwork is done, I’m leaving. I would have already left, but if I do, the doctor said my insurance wouldn’t cover any of this.”

  So, Nicky apparently wasn’t the only one caught in the red-tape maze today.

  “Gage said you’d been shot,” Amanda continued.

  “Grazed,” Nicky explained. “It’s nothing, really.”

  Amanda shook her head. “It is something. It means someone tried to kill you just like they tried to kill me.”

  Nicky hadn’t made up her mind yet if that last part was true or not. She went closer to the woman.

  “Will you tell me how you became a surrogate for my nephew?” Nicky asked.

  Silence.

  “Amanda already knows she’s a person of interest in this case,” Gage said.

  “I’m innocent,” she snapped. “I became a surrogate because I needed the money. I didn’t know until afterward what was going on.”

  “And when exactly did you learn what was going on?” Holden asked. He, too, went closer.

  More silence.

  It caused both Holden and Gage to huff.

  Since Nicky wasn’t sure how much time there’d be before that paperwork was done, she asked the one question she desperately wanted Amanda to answer. “Who set all of this up?”

  Amanda’s exhaled breath was long and weary. “I don’t know. But I can tell you who it wasn’t. It wasn’t me. If I’d just gotten all that ransom money, do you think I’d be worried about insurance paperwork?”

  She would if she wanted to add to the facade of being an innocent woman.

  “Then guess who’s behind it,” Holden persisted.

  “Beatrice,” Amanda readily answered. “But I’ve already told you that.” She paused, looked at Nicky. “And your father, of course.”

  Nicky felt her heart thud. Not because Amanda had mentioned her father, but because the woman had added that of course.

  “Why my father?” Nicky asked.

  Amanda made a sound as if the answer was obvious. “When I was still the manager there, he came to Conceptions several times. He made a pest of himself by demanding to know what procedures we were doing on his daughter. I told him I couldn’t give out that kind of information. The man was obsessed with having a grandchild.”

  Yes, he was, and it obviously didn’t seem to matter that he’d resented Annie for marrying Emmett. Or maybe Oscar had simply decided that he didn’t care about his feelings for his daughter as long as he got that heir he wanted.

  “Annie died ten months ago,” Nicky reminded Holden, “and the in v
itro would have been done on the surrogate—on Amanda—just a month later. Maybe less.”

  He nodded. “You think your father was so racked with grief that he did this and then covered it up with the ransom demand.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But I wasn’t the only surrogate,” Amanda blurted out. Her hand flew over her mouth, and it was obvious she hadn’t intended to spill that.

  Even though Nicky knew there’d been others, at least two of them since she had seen the files, what Amanda said gave her a very uneasy feeling.

  “Emmett and Annie don’t have another baby out there, do they?” Nicky asked.

  Amanda frantically shook her head. “I’ve already said too much.”

  No, she hadn’t said what Nicky needed to hear. One of those three in vitro procedures was still unaccounted for.

  “Please,” Nicky said to the woman. “I just need to know if I have another niece or nephew because he or she could be in grave danger.”

  More head shaking from Amanda. “I can’t help you.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” Holden snapped.

  “Can’t,” Amanda answered. “I honestly don’t know anything about a third baby. Heck, I don’t know much about my own delivery. They put me to sleep during the C-section, and when I woke up, the baby was already gone. They took him without even letting me see him.”

  “That’s all my client intends to say,” the lawyer said. “And you’ll have to leave now. You’re agitating her.”

  “A baby’s life could be at stake,” Nicky insisted.

  But Amanda just lowered her head. No eye contact. Nothing.

  “Sheriff Ryland will expect you to bring your client in for questioning,” Holden told the lawyer. “Or for her to surrender for an arrest.”

  “I’ll be at the sheriff’s office in the morning,” Amanda said, her voice a raw whisper. “Just make sure you have enough cops there to protect me. Because a baby isn’t the only one at risk. We all are.”

  For once they could agree on something, and as much as Nicky wanted to be at Amanda’s interrogation, she was betting that Holden wasn’t going to let her out of the house.

  “Let’s go,” Holden told Nicky, and he put his hand on her back to get her moving.

  “By some miracle you don’t remember anything else about that third file, do you?” he asked once they were in the hall and away from Amanda’s room.

  “No, and that’s why I need to find out what happened to those files.” That gave Nicky another wave of grief and guilt over Paul’s murder.

  “Is there any place where Paul could have stored them so he knew you’d find them?” Holden asked.

  Nicky gave that some thought. “We worked together many times so I guess he could have put the info in some of his old case files.”

  That prompted Holden to take out his phone and make a call. Not to Grayson this time. But to Drury. Holden didn’t put the call on speaker, but judging from what she could hear of the conversation, Drury was going to get started on that process.

  “Paul probably had a lot of case files,” she reminded Holden when he finished the call. “He’d been a PI for over twenty years.”

  A search would be a needle in a haystack. Still, it wasn’t as if they had a lot of leads at the moment. And the search was now more pressing than it had been. The file had said that both of Annie’s embryos had been implanted into a surrogate, but maybe there had been two surrogates and not just one.

  It turned Nicky’s stomach to think of another baby being out there—any baby—but this third child might also be Emmett an Annie’s.

  With that thought eating away at her, she and Holden made their way back to the ER, where Nicky hoped her release paperwork would be waiting for her. If not, she was going to ask Holden if they could leave anyway. She figured she wouldn’t get him to agree to that.

  Until she saw who was waiting for them in the treatment room where she’d gotten her stitches. Not the doctor or the nurse.

  But rather Beatrice.

  Holden automatically stepped in front of Nicky, and he put his hand over his gun. Beatrice’s eyes widened for a second, but then the glare came.

  “Really?” the woman snapped. “You think I’d come here to attack you?”

  Holden tipped his head toward the parking lot. “Considering what happened out there, I’m not taking any chances.”

  Beatrice added a huff to her glare. “I’m here to help you, and this is the thanks I get.”

  “What kind of help?” Holden asked, and his tone was one of a lawman questioning a hostile suspect. Beatrice qualified as both.

  “First, I need your assurances that you won’t bother me or my son any further.”

  “No deal.” Holden didn’t hesitate, either. “You’re a suspect in not only what happened at Conceptions Clinic, but also your husband’s disappearance.”

  “And I’ve already told you I’m innocent of both,” she snapped. Beatrice shifted her attention to Nicky. “I understand Amanda is hospitalized here.”

  Nicky only lifted her shoulder and didn’t intend to verify that. She wasn’t sure what Beatrice would do with the info.

  However, Holden had something to say. “Where’s your lawyer?”

  “In the car waiting for me. Why?”

  “I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t sneaking around trying to find Amanda and putting together another attack. Nicky and I have had our fill of bullets being fired at us.”

  “Fine, be that way. Believe what you will,” Beatrice continued, her voice a snarl now. “But I know Amanda’s here, and I know the things she’s been saying about me. She’s the reason you suspect that I might have done those horrible things. Well, I have proof that I didn’t.”

  “I’d be very interested in that proof,” Holden assured her.

  Even after making the claim of having something to clear her name, Beatrice looked as if she was still debating what to do. She finally reached in her purse, a move that had Holden drawing his gun.

  “I don’t carry a weapon,” Beatrice spat out.

  Holden didn’t holster his gun. He kept it aimed at her until they saw what Beatrice took from her purse. It was a flash drive. She didn’t hand it to them, though. She just lifted it for them to see.

  “What is that?” Nicky finally asked.

  “Proof. It’s the surveillance footage of me paying the ransom to get my son.”

  Of all the things that Nicky had been expecting the woman to say, that wasn’t one of them. Judging from the way he pulled back his shoulders, Holden was surprised, too. Or maybe he was just skeptical.

  “How did you get footage like that?” Holden demanded.

  “After things went wrong with the first kidnapping demand, I hired a PI, and he did surveillance not only of the park before the ransom drop, but also during and afterward.”

  Now it was Nicky who was skeptical. “The kidnappers didn’t notice they were being recorded?”

  “No.” But then Beatrice paused. “Or they didn’t seem to notice.”

  That was the key word here, seem. Whoever was paying those kidnappers had set up a complex operation with a lot of security in place. It seemed strange that they wouldn’t check for someone filming them. Of course, if the kidnappers were wearing ski masks, maybe they didn’t care since they couldn’t be identified.

  Nicky shook her head. “Why didn’t you give this to the cops?”

  “Because those monsters who brought me the baby said for me to stay quiet or they’d kill me and take the child.” Her breath was rapid now, and she looked away. “But now that so many people know what went on at Conceptions Clinic, I’m worried my son and I are in danger whether I talk or not.”

  Holden took a moment, no doubt to process that comment, since that’s what Nicky was doi
ng. “How would a surveillance tape of a ransom drop prove you’re innocent?” Holden asked.

  Beatrice took Nicky’s hand and put the flash drive in her palm. “Just watch it, and you’ll see who’s really responsible for all of this.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Holden put the flash drive in his laptop and watched as the info popped onto the screen. There was only one file, and it was indeed a video. However, that didn’t mean Beatrice was right about Nicky and him seeing the person who was responsible for the Genesis Project and the kidnappings.

  “The images could be doctored,” Holden reminded Nicky, though he doubted she needed such a reminder.

  After all, Beatrice was still a suspect and whatever was on the footage could be there simply to clear her name. Holden seriously doubted that the woman would have given them anything to incriminate herself. Just the opposite.

  Nicky nodded, her attention already nailed to the screen, but Holden didn’t miss that her forehead was bunched up. “Are you in pain?” he asked.

  “No.” But Nicky must have realized she said it too quickly because she flexed her eyebrows. “Just a little.”

  Translation—she was hurting bad. It didn’t matter that the bullet had only grazed her—she had five stitches, and the area around those stitches was no doubt throbbing.

  Even though the footage was already loading, he hit the pause button, and went to the bathroom off the master suite. While he was there, Holden checked on the baby and Landon—both were napping so he didn’t disturb them. He went back into the kitchen with a bottle of over-the-counter painkillers and got her a glass of water.

  It was a testament to how much Nicky truly was hurting because she didn’t argue with him about taking the meds. While he was at it, he sent a text to Gage so he could contact the doctor to write Nicky that prescription for pain meds that she’d turned down earlier.

  “I’m okay, really,” she said after she took the pills and set both the bottle and the water on the kitchen table.

  Holden went closer. In fact, he got right in her face, and he stared at her.

  “All right, I’ll be okay once the painkillers kick in,” she admitted.