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  “An armed moron,” Jackson supplied. “Who had called you just hours before he came here.”

  “So the police said.” Shannon moved to the edge of her seat so she was closer and eye-to-eye with Bailey. “I don’t know the man who came here. I never spoke to him, and I have no idea why he called me.”

  Bailey was about to suggest a reason—because Shannon might be neck-deep in all of this—but Jackson spoke before she could say anything.

  “You didn’t know the gunman, and you didn’t know my adoption attorney. Am I supposed to believe that? After all, you’re here together.”

  Shannon mumbled something under her breath, then said, “I’d never met or spoken to Ryan Cassaine before last night. I said I needed to clear up some things with you and asked him to drive me out here. I wasn’t sure you’d let me in if I came alone.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” Jackson assured her.

  Shannon snapped back her shoulders and stared at him.

  “Shannon didn’t give me a stolen child,” Ryan explained, sounding more frustrated with each word. “No one did. And everything about that adoption was perfectly legal.” He paused, then shook his head. “Jackson, I can’t believe you’d think I would do something like that. You asked me to find a baby. A private adoption. And that’s exactly what I did.”

  Bailey didn’t blindly accept that. “You don’t think there’s any chance, even a slight one, that Jackson’s adopted son is my missing baby?”

  “No.” But Ryan had no sooner said that when he dodged her gaze.

  Mercy, was the man hiding something?

  “You were with Caden’s so-called birth mother when she delivered him?” Bailey pressed Ryan.

  “Of course not. Jackson asked me to find a baby, so I did some checking. I put out a lot of feelers, and soon I got the call from the birth mother. And she’s not ‘so-called.’ She is his birth mother.”

  “Go over the details of that again,” Jackson insisted.

  Ryan huffed, louder this time. “She called me hours after she gave birth and told me that she wanted to give up her baby for adoption. A healthy baby boy. But she had no insurance and a lot of medical and credit card bills. She also wanted to go back to college. So, as you know, I contacted you, and together we came up with a sum to compensate her.”

  “How much compensation?” Bailey wanted to know. And she looked at Jackson for the answer.

  He shrugged. “A million to the birth mother, and then there were Ryan’s legal fees.”

  A million dollars. That was probably a drop in the bucket for Jackson, but Bailey figured there were many people who would have sold a baby for that amount or less.

  Her baby.

  She turned to Ryan. “What proof do you have that this woman actually gave birth to Caden?”

  “The usual documents. Hospital records. The application for a birth certificate. A statement from the midwife who assisted with the delivery.”

  “They could have been faked.” Bailey slid her gaze to Shannon. “And someone who works in a hospital would have known how to fake them.”

  That brought Shannon to her feet for another round of denial. Ryan got in on it as well.

  “Quiet!” Jackson ordered. It wasn’t a shout. It didn’t have to be. Jackson had a way of commanding attention. “I want to talk to the birth mother.”

  Ryan was shaking his head before Jackson even finished. “Impossible. Evan has already tried and failed. She demanded a closed adoption, and you agreed. That was all part of the deal.”

  “Renegotiate the deal,” Jackson insisted. “Offer her more compensation. All I want is a simple conversation.”

  Ryan glared at Bailey as if she were the cause of this demand. And she was. But Jackson seemed to be on a quest for the truth as well. Was that because he believed Caden wasn’t her son and therefore she wasn’t a threat to the adoption?

  “I’ll make some calls,” Ryan finally conceded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Jackson didn’t thank the man, but instead looked at Shannon. “And as for you, I’d like you to take a lie-detector test.”

  Shannon looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “SAPD gave me one and I passed.”

  “Then you shouldn’t mind taking another. I have a friend who teaches at the FBI Academy in Quantico. He’s a truth analyst, and he uses some cutting-edge technology that’s several steps beyond the normal lie detector.”

  Bailey examined Shannon’s expression. The woman seemed even more uncomfortable than she had when she first arrived, but then maybe anyone would be in her position. Bailey so wanted it to be Shannon who had taken the child, because Shannon was here, right in front of them, and if she confessed, then it could all be over. She would know what had happened when the mystery woman walked out of the hospital with her newborn son.

  But Shannon didn’t appear to be on the verge of confessing anything.

  “All right,” Shannon told Jackson. “Schedule the lie-detector test and I’ll take it.”

  Bailey was both surprised and relieved, though agreeing to the test was one thing. Taking it was something else.

  “Will you help me clear my name?” Shannon said, and it took Bailey a moment to realize that the woman was talking to her and not Jackson.

  “I’m doing everything to find my son,” Bailey told her. “And if finding him helps clear your name, then of course I’ll help. But if you’re guilty, if you are the one who took him, I want you to tell me now.”

  “I didn’t take him.” Tears sprang to the woman’s eyes. “I swear I didn’t.”

  Ryan couldn’t have looked more disinterested about Shannon’s emotional response. He checked his watch and glanced impatiently at his car. “I need to get back to my office and contact the birth mother.”

  “Or you could give me her number and I’ll contact her myself,” Jackson offered.

  “I don’t have her number, only her attorney’s. Since it’s the holidays, it might take me a while to reach her. She’s likely on break from her college classes.”

  “You’ll find her,” Jackson said with complete certainty, and in such a way that it sounded like a threat.

  Ryan didn’t miss the undertone. The attorney’s jaw tightened again, and he motioned for Shannon to follow him.

  “I’m innocent,” Shannon insisted one more time before she left with Ryan.

  Jackson and Bailey stood there and watched them drive away. Steven followed behind them in his truck, probably to make sure they left the grounds.

  “Well?” Jackson asked. “Did you believe everything they said?”

  “I’m not sure. You?”

  “I never believe anyone until I have proof.”

  “You believed me,” she reminded him.

  That brought his gaze to hers. And he nodded. “I believe your son is missing. I believe someone wants to harm you. I believe you’re searching for the truth.”

  “And if I find the truth?” she asked cautiously.

  “The truth doesn’t change, even if it’s hard to accept.” He stared at her. “I’ve had Caden for nearly four months now, since he was a week old.”

  She knew what he was saying. She hadn’t even held her son, but Jackson had been Caden’s father. And even though she might indeed be the little boy’s mother, she was a stranger to him.

  Yes, the truth was often hard to accept.

  And in this case it was heartbreaking.

  Jackson turned, eased his arm around her and pulled her to him. This didn’t feel like a veiled threat. It didn’t feel intimidating.

  Unfortunately, it felt right.

  It would be so easy just to take what he was offering her. But Bailey pulled back.

  “Does this chemistry between us have something to do with Caden?” she asked.

  Those dangerous gray eyes narrowed slightly. “Do you mean am I pretending to be attracted to you? No,” he answered before she could respond.

  He pulled her to him again. “Trust me, if I could feel differently ab
out you, I would. You’re a threat, plain and simple, and yes, I have been thinking about how to neutralize the threat.” He stayed quiet a moment. “But then I’ve also been thinking about kissing you.”

  That both frightened and excited her, because she’d been thinking about kissing him, too. “I’m not faking the attraction either,” she confessed. “That means we have a problem.”

  Jackson was so close now, practically right in her face, looking down at her. The corner of his mouth lifted, causing a dimple to flash in his cheek. A dimple. On any other man, that might have added a touch of wholesomeness to dark, rugged looks, but his looks were nowhere in the realm of being wholesome.

  In a fantasy, Jackson would have been the pirate. A Wild West outlaw. Or the vampire who had his deadly desire barely under control. A face and body perfect for seducing and drawing women in.

  But she suspected he’d never had to seduce a woman in his life.

  “Are you as bad as I think you are?” she asked. Mercy. There was too much breath in her voice, and she sounded as if she were under his spell. Heck, she was. Maybe that vampire fantasy wasn’t so far off the mark.

  He nodded. “Once, I was attracted to a business rival, and I slept with her. The next week I did a hostile takeover of her company.”

  For some stupid reason, that made Bailey smile. What was wrong with her? She should be pulling away, but the sound of his voice and that half smile made her feel all warm and golden.

  “I’m not a nice guy,” he added. And he lowered his head and touched his mouth to hers.

  Bailey felt as if she were melting.

  She’d expected his mouth to be slightly rough and warm. It was. She’d expected him to know how to kiss.

  He did.

  But even with all those expectations in place, she was still shocked at what he was doing to her. It was as if he knew just the right pressure, just the right angle to draw as much from the kiss as was humanly possible. This was the reason people kissed and fantasized about kissing, she decided. So they could feel this slow hunger slide right through them.

  The moment was perfect: the sun-washed room, the devil in the great-fitting jeans who had her in his arms, her body yielding to the pressure and heat that his mouth had created.

  Bailey lifted her hand to slip it around the back of his neck and draw him closer, but she stopped at the last second. What she didn’t do was stop the kiss. She couldn’t. She began to tingle, the sensation starting at her mouth and gliding through the rest of her. Everything inside her suddenly wanted this. And more.

  It had been so long since she’d had more, and she’d never had the likes of Jackson Malone. Kissing him was playing with fire, and that still didn’t make her pull away.

  Jackson was the one who stopped. He blinked and stared down into her eyes. “That was better than I thought it would be,” he complained. “And my expectation had been pretty high.”

  Yes. She knew exactly what he meant.

  Thankfully, Bailey didn’t have to voice that, because his cell rang. And just like that, the moment was lost. Good thing, too. One kiss shouldn’t feel like hours of foreplay. It shouldn’t leave her body with a dull ache that only one thing would cure. And that one thing was someone she couldn’t have or kiss again.

  Jackson answered the call, but continued to study her. “Evan,” he greeted, after glancing at the screen.

  That was it. All he said. But it snapped her back to reality and out of the land of kissing foreplay and wild fantasies. A good thing, too, because this call could be critical. Again, Bailey couldn’t hear the conversation, but she prayed Evan had the DNA test results and that the results would prove that Caden was hers.

  Jackson didn’t exactly put on a poker face. As he listened, his jaw muscles went to war with each other. His mouth bent into a snarl.

  “Find out what happened and get someone down to that lab immediately. If there’s been any kind of breach in privacy, I want to know about it.”

  That finished sobering her up. Sweet heaven. This certainly didn’t seem like good news.

  “What happened?” she asked, the moment he hung up.

  “The lab misplaced the DNA test results.”

  “What?” Her mind began to race. Had the woman who’d stolen her baby somehow got the results so that Jackson and she couldn’t learn the truth?

  “Don’t go there yet,” Jackson mumbled. “It’s the holidays. The lab is working with just a skeleton crew, so the tests could still be there, but maybe misfiled.”

  She shook her head. He seemed so calm about this. Maybe too calm. “But someone might have tampered with them.”

  “Evan’s taking a second set to another lab.”

  And that brought her to yet another concern.

  “Can I trust Evan?” she asked. “Would he doctor the results to get me out of the way?”

  “No,” Jackson said with complete confidence. “He might insist that I lie to you. He might even try to handle getting you out of the picture on his own. But he would tell me the truth.”

  Hopefully, Jackson would do the same for her, but Bailey had to be realistic. She needed to figure out how to get her own sample of Caden’s DNA so she could compare it to the stored umbilical cord.

  “Don’t borrow trouble,” Jackson murmured. He put his hand on the small of her back to get her moving inside.

  But Bailey didn’t move a single step when she heard the loud noise.

  A blast of some kind.

  Everything happened fast. Too fast for her to figure out what was going on. One second she was standing, and the next moment she was on the floor of the sunroom where Jackson had pushed her.

  She looked back at Jackson, ready to ask what was going on, but the next sound clarified things for her.

  Something slammed into one of the sunroom panels and sent glass spraying over them. My God.

  Someone was shooting at them.

  Chapter Seven

  Jackson pulled Bailey to the side of the sofa.

  It wasn’t a second too soon.

  Another bullet came tearing through the sunroom, shattering the glass and sending the dangerous spray of jagged pieces right at them.

  “Caden!” Bailey shouted, covering her head.

  “He’s in the panic room.” Jackson was beyond thankful for that. The panic room was bulletproof and impossible for anyone to penetrate, unless they knew the security codes. His son was safe.

  Jackson couldn’t say the same for Bailey and him. Their lives were on the line.

  Whoever the hell was doing this would pay and pay hard. Of course, the question was, who was firing those shots? And with all his safeguards in place, how the devil had anyone gotten onto the grounds?

  “Not again,” Bailey mumbled. “Please God, this can’t be happening again.”

  She couldn’t keep from remembering the hostage situation at the maternity hospital and reliving the nightmares that came with that fateful day. Jackson couldn’t stop the flashbacks, not for her or himself. Images of the bodies from the plane crash came back at him like lethal bullets. But he wouldn’t let that old trauma immobilize him and stop him from figuring a way out of this life-and-death situation.

  “Stay down,” he warned Bailey, and he pushed her all the way to the floor.

  Jackson tried to shelter her as best he could, but it was next to impossible. They were literally in a glass room, and the delicate wicker furniture didn’t provide much protection. Added to that, he didn’t have any weapons he could use to defend them.

  More shots came, each of them eating through what was left of the glass and tearing into the furniture. Jackson made sure Bailey stayed flat on the floor so it would minimize the shooter’s kill zone, but he figured this measure wouldn’t save them for long.

  He had to get Bailey out of there.

  But how?

  Jackson glanced back at the entry into the main house. The door was wide open, but it was a good twenty feet away. They could crawl to reach it, but that was
twenty feet wide out in the open. A lot of bullets could come at them during that short space.

  In between the din of the bullet barrage, Jackson could hear the shouts from inside the house. No doubt his staff was trying to figure out what to do. Someone had already called 9-1-1. Steven had almost certainly been alerted. Help was on the way.

  But help might come too late.

  The next round of bullets came directly at the sofa. And that told Jackson a lot about the shooter. He was probably using a rifle with a high-powered scope. In other words, the gunman knew exactly where Bailey and he were. It also told him something else.

  The shooter might not even be on the estate.

  It was possible their attacker was positioned in one of the tall trees that grew along the estate walls. As long as the walls themselves weren’t touched, it wouldn’t have triggered the security system and therefore wouldn’t have alerted anyone on his staff. Of course, Jackson had considered something like that would be possible, but since he’d spent his entire life without being shot at, he had never considered it to be a real threat.

  But it was real now.

  “What do we do?” Bailey asked.

  She was shaking, but her voice was surprisingly strong and determined. Good. Because she would need every ounce of strength and determination to get out of this alive.

  “We have to move,” Jackson told her, knowing that this might not be the right thing to do.

  Hell, it was possible they didn’t have any right moves. But he couldn’t blindly accept that they were going to die today. Somehow, he had to figure out a way to stay alive for the sake of his son. He intended to raise his little boy, to love him, and Jackson wouldn’t let some SOB take away Caden’s father.

  He glanced back at the entry that seemed to be getting farther away, and he spotted José, one of the gardeners. The terrified-looking man was holding a rifle, and he lifted it, no doubt questioning Jackson about what he should do.

  Jackson wanted him to return fire, hoping it would give him an opportunity to get Bailey into the house.

  “Can you get the rifle to me?” Jackson shouted.

  The young man gave a shaky nod, and he got down into a crouching position so he could inch toward the entry.