The Colton Ransom (11 page)

She blew out a breath and let her head drop back against the seat’s headrest. Gabby stared up at the darkened interior of the vehicle’s ceiling. “I don’t know what to make of you.”

Trevor laughed softly for a change, rather than the harsh, dismissive laugh he normally resorted to when confronted with someone he viewed to be part of the clueless rich. “That makes two of us, Gabby.”

She kept her face forward, pretending to stare out into the darkness, but nonetheless, she could feel a small smile of satisfaction curving the corners of her mouth ever so slightly.

She was making headway into the stubborn mule’s territory, she silently congratulated herself. Granted, they were baby steps, but they were still steps and that was what counted.

Silence had returned for a moment and she took the opportunity to return to the question she’d wanted to ask before he’d gone off on this tangent regarding her foundation.

“No call?”

It was a rhetorical question on her part, meant to get him talking rather than bottling up everything inside the way he’d been doing for the better part of their afternoon and evening of interrogations.

“No.” The single word echoed like a hollow sound inside the darkened cab of the truck. “They’ve probably realized their mistake by now and done away with her.” His very throat hurt to say that, but he’d never been anything but a realist—and it had never cost him so much as it did now.

But Gabby was not about to share his dark outlook. “You just can’t think like that, Trevor,” she staunchly insisted.

“Then how am I
supposed
to think?” he demanded. He was just being logical—and it cost him greatly. “They took the kid, thinking she was the old man’s granddaughter and they could get a lot of money out of him in exchange for bringing her back. If they’re not calling, they
know
she isn’t his. What other reason is there for not calling?”

She sensed that, on some level, he wanted to be convinced that she was right and he was wrong. Gabby’s mind scrambled for a plausible excuse and she grasped on to a fragment of a thought, following it to its conclusion.

“Maybe killing Faye threw them for a loop. Kidnapping an infant is one thing. They take her, they give her back and no one’s hurt except for my father’s pocket. But Faye got in their way and they had to kill her—or, even more likely, they killed her by accident.

“But either way, they killed her, and if they’re not professionals, which it’s beginning to look like they’re not, that’s got to really be hard for them to deal with,” she maintained.

“They can’t just press a button, declare ‘game over’ and have everything go back to the way it was to begin with. They’re rattled right now. They’re trying to figure out their next move—if they can even think straight at this point.” She turned to face him in the darkened cab, satisfied with her theory. “They’ll call,” she told him firmly.

He laughed shortly. This time the sound was not intended to be a put-down. This time, it was done to release a measure of tension that had been riding shotgun with him since he’d discovered the empty crib and realized that the daughter he’d been wishing out of existence was actually gone.

It suddenly occurred to him that the guilt he’d been laying at Gabby’s doorstep belonged to him, not her. It was his, no matter how hard he tried to place it somewhere else. He’d wished Avery away and now she could actually be gone and remain that way.

“It’s my fault,” he said out loud.

It was almost as if he were talking to himself. Gabby debated pretending that she hadn’t heard him, but she couldn’t just leave it alone. She
had
to know what he meant by that.

“What’s your fault?”

He stared into the darkness. “It’s my fault she’s gone,” he said hoarsely.

Gabby studied his profile for a long moment, barely able to make out his features in the dark. He was serious, she thought. “Just how do you figure that?” she asked.

“Because I didn’t want her. Because I wished her away.” And now he regretted that from the very bottom of his soul.

Did he actually believe that? The man was more sensitive than she’d thought.

And he was also wrong.

“If it was as simple as that,” she pointed out gently, “if people could just wish things away, I guarantee you that Darla would have been a thing of the past even
before
she ever got her hooks into my father and married him.” The woman was a barracuda and everyone but her father had seen that from the first moment Darla came on the scene. “Wishing doesn’t make things so.” That was not a viewpoint that a pessimist would adopt, Gabby thought. “And you of all people should know that,” she insisted.

He shrugged, still trying to deal with his guilt—and getting nowhere, although he did appreciate her efforts to talk him out of it.

Because she was trying to make him feel better about it, Trevor found himself warming up to her and decided to tell her
why
he’d shunned the role of father when he’d first learned about Avery.

“I figured I’d make one lousy father,” he explained to her.

“You can’t know that for sure,” Gabby countered. “Not until you’re actually in that position.”

She was wrong. He knew. In his gut, he knew. Or he’d
thought
he knew. “It was just that I don’t have the first idea about what it takes to be a father. I sure didn’t have any role model to follow,” he told her. Then, because she’d looked at him quizzically, he said aloud something he’d never told anyone else. “My own father couldn’t wait to be rid of me.”

Gabby tried to remember what she’d heard about his father. And then it came to her. “Your father used to work as a hand on the ranch, didn’t he?”

That was the phrase for it.
Used to.
“Yeah. He drifted from job to job,” Trevor told her. “When he drifted away from Dead River, he decided to leave me behind like so much dirty laundry.”

Gabby saw his jaw harden in the sliver of moonlight that shone in.

“Just up and abandoned me without a single word.” Up until then, he’d still tried to get his father to notice him, still tried to curry the man’s favor. “I woke up one morning and he was gone. Faye raised me. Never said a word to make me feel bad about it or feel guilty because it was a hardship for her in any way. She just acted as if it was the most normal thing in the world to pick up the reins that my old man had dropped and take over.

“She let me know that I’d always have a home with her,” he recalled. “And I paid her back by getting her killed.”

She didn’t see how he could make that sort of leap. “Why would you think that?”

“Protecting my daughter was what got her killed,” he realized. “Faye could tell the babies apart. She had to know that the baby the kidnapper was making off with was mine—and she probably knew that if the old man got wind of it, he wouldn’t put up the ransom money.” And that had got her killed, he thought. There was no way he would ever be able to pay her back for her sacrifice and it ate away at him.

“It was in Faye’s nature to protect the ones who couldn’t protect themselves,” Gabby gently pointed out. “None of this is your fault,” she insisted. “And she wouldn’t have wanted you to think that it was.”

But he didn’t see it that way. Faye had made the supreme sacrifice for him—and he didn’t deserve it. “Hell, even my own mother died on me.”

“I’m sure she would have much rather gone on living and taking care of you. In any event,” Gabby added, seeing that he wasn’t ready to accept what she’d just said, nor would he allow it to comfort him, “she didn’t just decide one day to abandon you the way your father did—and the way my mother did with my sisters and me,” Gabby added.

The revelation surprised him and he looked at her. He decided that she was just making that up to make him feel better.

“Your mother died in a car accident,” Trevor reminded her.

“Yes, she did,” Gabby confirmed. “But first she left us. One day she just decided after having three kids that she wasn’t cut out for motherhood—or for being married to my father, so she left all four of us, shedding us like so many unwanted pounds, and then she reembraced the single life.

“Unfortunately for her, it didn’t turn out to be for all that long. But they didn’t find any signs of remorse when they went through her things after the funeral. No regret for a rash action.” She knew that she had cherished that hope—that her mother had regretted leaving them, if not her father—but hope had died a very cruel, quick death. “My sisters and I were expendable to her like unwanted baggage.”

“If that’s the case, then how can you stay so upbeat and optimistic?” he asked. From what she’d just told him, her thoughts, her attitude, should be just as dark, as pessimistic, as his were.

“I have to,” she told him simply. “The alternative is much too bleak for me. I have to believe that things do eventually work themselves out, that good triumphs over evil and that the sun will come up tomorrow,” she concluded, the corners of her mouth curving as she deliberately quoted a lyric from an old favorite show tune.

A lyric, she could see by the man’s totally unenlightened expression, that was completely lost on Trevor.

But what wasn’t lost on him was that, despite the partial darkness within the cab of the truck, Gabby seemed to almost glow.

And there was something very compelling about that.

Very compelling about her.

Before he knew it, Trevor had decreased the space between them within the truck until there wasn’t any—which was fine with him because he had no need of any.

At least not now, while he was kissing her.

Chapter 10

W
hen he looked back on it later, Trevor honestly couldn’t have said exactly what had caused him to lower his guard, to allow the tight rein he always held around his emotions to loosen just a little—just enough to let this break in decorum happen. To allow the feelings that he had been harboring and, for the most part, successfully hiding, to suddenly emerge and dictate this uncustomary shift in his behavior.

If Trevor had to point a finger at a catalyst, it would have been impossible for him to actually pick only one.

The reason for the break was embedded in a combination of occurrences. There was Faye’s senseless murder, coupled as it was with his daughter’s kidnapping, and, to tie it all together, he had come face-to-face with the brutal reality that the man he was expected to give his unquestioning loyalty and allegiance to had absolutely no regard for him—or his daughter—as human beings.

Even strangers could be moved to sympathy for another stranger if that person’s plight warranted it, and what could be a more sympathy-generating situation than realizing that a person’s child had been kidnapped and needed ransoming?

Moreover, had circumstances been ever-so-slightly different, it would have been Jethro’s granddaughter and not
his
daughter who would have been abducted from her crib.

Given the weight of all that, plus the fact that no headway had been made in either finding Faye’s killer or Avery’s kidnapper, it seemed understandable that his defenses were eroded and his exposed soul was in desperate need of some comfort.

Whether he acknowledged it or not, Trevor craved solace and connection to another human being.

And Gabby was available.

The moment his lips made contact with hers, all logical thought ceased, at least for that isolated island of time.

And, as he gave in and kissed her, Trevor was surprised to discover something almost life affirming, something that stirred a part of him that had long been relegated to the shadows. Relegated there for so long that he believed it to be either completely dead or, at the very least, no longer functioning. Trevor
certainly
hadn’t believed that his heart could come alive like this. This flood of emotion—of vulnerability—ached for sustenance as well as encouragement.

She did this to him.

The kiss and what it awoke inside of him made him acutely aware that he wanted more. He wanted to taste her, to hold her, to completely lose himself in her and forget that a world existed beyond the boundaries of this truck.

Gabby and the simple act of kissing her made him want to cross lines, to feel things that had no practical value or basis for existence, other than existence for its own sake.

The solemnity that had been his constant companion for so long that he couldn’t remember being any other way, for a fleeting moment, drifted away from him. For once Trevor didn’t feel weighed down to the point that it was a struggle for him to walk upright.

Rather, it was now a struggle not to feel weightless.

The moan that creased the night air could have belonged to either one of them.

Trevor neither knew, nor cared which of them it
did
belong to. It was the unadulterated sound of pleasure, something he was basically unacquainted with and that he was now humbled to be allowed to share—whether or not he was responsible for the moan.

He did know that his entire body was heating up and causing him to seriously entertain the idea of giving in, of losing control and being happy about it rather than horrified or annoyed with himself for being a willing participant.

Shaken, thrilled, confused and just about breathless, Gabby felt herself responding to a kiss she’d had no part in initiating.

To say she was surprised to have Trevor kiss her would have been the understatement of the century.

After all that she’d been through today, a part was convinced she had to be dreaming. After all, she’d thought about what it had to be like to be kissed by this scowling, incredibly attractive man who seemed so indifferent to the sensual waves he seemed to always be generating.

Thought about it more than once.

Until today, Gabby had to admit that she had been equally intimidated by and attracted to the head of the ranch’s security. But today’s events had somehow managed to galvanize her, to harden her backbone and make her speak her mind rather than just quietly seeking to retreat if he scowled at her too hard.

It was as if everything that had transpired today had put them on equal footing: her father had collapsed and fallen into a coma, his daughter had been kidnapped and a woman who had touched both their lives, who had in effect had a hand in raising both of them and whom they both loved, had been callously murdered and permanently snatched away from them.

Sharing something like that
had
to change the boundaries around them, to change the rules that governed their actions.

And sharing something like that had to leave them, in their own way, both equally vulnerable.

That was the word for it, Gabby realized as the fire inside of her continued growing hotter and stronger:
vulnerable.

Vulnerable to the point that she wanted to throw caution to the wind and take what was unfolding between them this moment as far as it both demanded and needed to be taken.

He’d started it, Trevor thought, so he had to be the one to stop it no matter how much he felt that he wanted her.

It didn’t matter
what
was going on inside of him, what he felt, he was still just the help and she, she was the boss’s daughter, part of the hierarchy to whom he owed allegiance. Given the present post that he held, he knew that he was even expected to lay his life down to protect her.

But anything outside of that was unacceptable, no matter what kind of feelings collided within him or how much he literally
ached
to possess her. To make love with her.

That shouldn’t, that
couldn’t
be allowed to happen.

So, despite the fact that Trevor wanted to wrap his arms around her so tightly that they would be all but impossible to pry loose, he forced himself to slip his hands up to her shoulders, and rather than pull her even closer against him, seizing his last ounce of inner strength, he pushed her back away from him, breaking at least their physical connection.

For a second, Gabby just looked up at him, utterly dazed.

Trevor took the opportunity to pull himself together—or to at least try. Several seconds went by before he could even locate his voice. When he finally did, it sounded almost surreal to his ear as he uttered a two-word sentence.

“I’m sorry.”

Gabby continued to stare at him as if he had lapsed into some strange foreign language she couldn’t begin to understand.

And then, when she finally found her own voice, she replied, “I’m not.”

It wasn’t the response he’d expected.

Trevor was convinced that the woman who had unconsciously stripped his armor away, leaving him naked and exposed, would grasp at his words, acknowledge what he was trying to do and agree that he should be sorry. Not only that, but he expected her to deny even the existence of those moments that had passed between them, tucking them away in a place where shameful secrets were amassed with the hope that they would expire and quickly fade away.

Instead, she blew that all apart with her own two words.

I’m not.

“You’re not?” Trevor heard himself ask her incredulously.

Did she even realize what she was admitting to? he wondered, sincerely doubting that she did.

But when she firmly reiterated, “No, I’m not,” it made him question his own conclusion about their possible pairing as well as everything else within his stark, all-but-monastic world.

Clearing his throat, unable to think clearly and deal with these confused feelings properly right now, all he could say to her was, “It’s been a hell of a day. I think we both need to get some sleep.”

There was no arguing the first part, but she differed with him on the second part. “I think we both know we won’t get any,” she countered.

Trevor had stirred things up inside her and she was fairly certain that she had done the same to him, at least to some extent. She knew that the stress they were under was partially responsible, but
only
partially.

Stress had allowed each of their carefully constructed veneers to crack just enough to release their trapped feelings. And that, in turn, allowed them to act on those heretofore untapped feelings.

It was a lot to take in.

For now it was enough that she’d let him know that what had happened was not off-putting to her, that she had enjoyed it and that she did
not
regret it.

The next step, Gabby thought, just as the first one had been, was up to him. She’d done what she could to let Trevor know that she was willing to have this thing between them go further—now the ball was back in his court.

A ball, she had a feeling, that would remain in play while they went on to try to solve the all-consuming, confounding mysteries that were surrounding Dead River and its inhabitants.

He started up the truck again, careful to keep his eyes on the road and
only
the road. “I’m going to get an early start in the morning, question the rest of the people on your list.”

“I’ll come with you,” she promised, expecting him to give her another gruff argument, the way he had earlier today when she’d first volunteered.

Instead, Trevor just nodded and said, “Good.” Gabby stared at him, both surprised and pleased.

Sparing her a glance, he saw a smile work its way along her lips—it was surprising what a man could see in the dark if he set his mind to it, Trevor couldn’t help thinking.

He was unaware that his own mouth curved in a smile in kind—but Gabby wasn’t.

It warmed her heart the rest of the way back to the house.

* * *

Trevor dropped her off at the main entrance to the mansion, then drove the truck around to the wing where he and the rest of the senior staff lived. Parking the vehicle, he went in.

Nothing had actually changed during the time they’d been gone—and yet, it had. The change within him was subtle. He realized that he was actually optimistic about the possibility of finding his daughter, something he really hadn’t been when he’d begun his own investigation into the kidnapping.

The optimism was all Gabby’s doing.

He hoped to God it wasn’t unwarranted.

* * *

“Where’ve you been?” Amanda asked, relieved and all but pouncing on her youngest sister the minute she walked in through the front door.

Gabby realized belatedly that she had stopped calling either one of her sisters for an hourly update on their father’s condition several hours ago. But she
had
told them what she was doing.

“Out trying to help Trevor track down his daughter. Remember? I told you the last time I called to check on Dad’s coma.”

“Any luck?” Catherine asked.

Gabby shook her head. “Not yet. We’re still questioning people, hoping someone says something that’ll point us in the right direction. So far,” she told her sisters as she sank into an oversize chair and allowed it to all but swallow her up, “everyone’s got an alibi for the time that the baby was kidnapped and Faye was murdered.” She sighed as frustration took a firm hold of her again.

“Maybe it was some drifter,” Catherine suggested, looking from one sister to another to see how the idea struck them.

But Gabby was skeptical—as was Amanda.

“A drifter who knew just where the nursery was located and that Dad had the kind of money that would make kidnapping a three-month-old worthwhile?” Gabby asked, shaking her head. “I don’t think so.”

But Catherine wasn’t quite ready to let go of her theory—or to blame someone at the ranch for both heinous crimes.

“Even drifters know where the Colton ranch is,” she protested. Her eyes shifted toward Amanda, silently asking for backup.

The latter was holding Cheyenne in her arms, as she had been ever since the moment she returned from the hospital. It was apparent that because of what had happened, she was exceedingly reluctant to let her daughter go or have the baby out of her sight for even a few minutes.

What if the kidnapper hadn’t acted alone? Or had inspired someone else at the ranch to try their hand at running off with Cheyenne?

“I think Gabby might be right,” Amanda told Catherine. “The few hands who were left on the ranch would have noticed a drifter and said something to the chief about it,” she pointed out.

Catherine shrugged, surrendering. She sat down beside Gabby.

“How’s Dad?” Gabby asked, changing the subject for now. She didn’t want to get into a long, drawn-out discussion about nonexistent drifters. “Has he regained consciousness?”

Rocking her sleeping baby against her, Amanda shook her head. “No, and I don’t know if he ever will.” She frowned as she told Gabby, “The way he was talking before he lost consciousness again, it seemed like he’d just given up on everything.”

Gabby refused to accept that. “Not Dad. If he had,” she argued, “then he wouldn’t have made such a big deal about not ransoming Avery. Even Dad knows you can’t take it with you,” she pointed out.

“Maybe you’re right,” Amanda acknowledged. “But all I know was that when we were talking about the kidnapping, there was this terrible look of sorrow that came into his eyes—”

“Maybe all this talk about kidnapping made him remember losing Cole,” Catherine suddenly suggested to her sisters.

Cole was the name of the half brother they had never met. Born to their father’s first wife, the boy had been abducted as a baby shortly after his mother had died. Their father had been hit with a double tragedy, which some people felt explained his present angry attitude.

Cole was never found. To this day, they didn’t know if he was alive somewhere or if he had died at the hands of his kidnapper.

At the mention of the first kidnapped child, Amanda shivered and looked grimly at her youngest sister. “Certainly makes you think that maybe this branch of the family is cursed, doesn’t it?”