The Colton Ransom Read online

  And if they were aware of that, then what happened to Avery? Would whoever had kidnapped her just abandon the infant, or would something more drastic happen to Trevor’s daughter?

  The very thought, even if she didn’t follow it through to its ultimate dire conclusion, chilled her down to the very bone.

  “I don’t know,” Trevor bit off, using annoyance as a shield to hide the fact that he was growing progressively more and more worried about his daughter. Because of the note, he knew there would be some communication, but the waiting was killing him. Worrying wasn’t going to bring Avery back. And, he had the feeling, neither would anything or anyone else. It was up to him to find his daughter and rescue her. “I haven’t read up on my latest installment of the kidnappers’ handbook.”

  He was upset—she got that and cut him some slack for being even more surly than usual. “So what are we going to do?” she wanted to know.

  There was no way he was going to have her come with him. “We aren’t going to do anything,” he told her, emphasizing the pronoun she’d used. “But I’m going to go talk to those people on the list you gave me—”

  “I’ll come with you,” she volunteered.

  “No, you won’t,” he told her firmly.

  The last thing he wanted was a distraction tagging along. Right now, he was torn between blaming Gabby for his daughter’s disappearance and being uncomfortably attracted to her. The former was counterproductive, not to mention a waste of time, and he definitely didn’t have time for the latter. The best way to handle both situations was just to not have her around. It was a course of action he intended to follow.

  But Gabby had other ideas.

  “Yes, I will,” she insisted. When he started to tell her that there was no way in hell he was going to let her and her bleeding heart tag along while he questioned her less-than-savory candidates for the center, she shut him down with a blast of logic. “They’re not going to talk to you, not with that attitude of yours. They’re used to me and, to an extent, they trust me. If there’s anything that any of them know that remotely has to do with the kidnapping, they’ll tell me, not you,” she informed him flatly.

  The fact that she qualified her reference to the teenagers’ trust, saying they only trusted her to a certain extent, told him that she had more of a realistic grasp of the situation than he’d given her credit for. Maybe it actually was better if he brought Jethro’s daughter along.

  Besides, as he saw it, he didn’t have all that much choice in the matter.

  “Okay,” he allowed. “You can come. But I’m in charge of the investigation.”

  “Fine with me,” she agreed. This wasn’t about one-upmanship—it was about saving a little girl.

  He had his doubts about the veracity of her statement, but he could hope. “Let’s go,” he ordered, heading for the front door. “We’re just wasting time, standing around here.”

  “You got it,” she said, eagerly falling in right beside him.

  * * *

  Questioning the people on the list she had written down for Trevor took the rest of the day. By the end of it, they still hadn’t finished. Several people on the list were still left to question. But those they were going to have to see the following day.

  Over the course of that time, Trevor had periodically checked in with Mathilda, asking the head housekeeper if there’d been a call yet. There was no need to specify from whom. The other woman knew exactly who he was talking about.

  And each time she told him that there hadn’t, his stomach tightened a little more, twisting itself into a knot.

  And each time, just before he hung up, the housekeeper would assure him that, “Don’t worry. They’ll call.”

  But Trevor was far from certain that they would, and the longer he had to wait, the less confident he became that his daughter was still alive.

  When he ended the call just before they turned around to drive back to the ranch for the night, Gabby could see by the look on Trevor’s face that they were still left dangling.

  She was about to ask him about it when he suddenly slanted a glance in her direction and almost belligerently asked, “Just what do you get out of it, anyway?”

  For the most part, Trevor never wondered about someone else’s business. But Gabby’s determined involvement with this foundation to help a handful of inner-city teens had stirred up his curiosity to a fierce level. Why would someone like her want to spend her time and her money, not to mention her effort, on that kind of an endeavor?

  He knew what he thought was behind something like this. But he wanted to hear it from her.

  Trevor supposed that there was a part of him that was hoping she’d say something that would redeem the outlook he had about this sort of a venture undertaken by someone of privilege like her.

  “Get out of it?” Gabby echoed. She realized that he’d switched gears and was referring to her working with those kids he’d been questioning. He made it sound like a strict monetary investment for profit and she knew that couldn’t be what he really meant. That sort of view was far too jaded. Trevor couldn’t be thinking of her in that sort of light—or could he?

  “Yeah, what do you get out of it?” he repeated. “Are you just slumming amid the ‘poor folk’ so you can feel superior about yourself? Or are you just trying to do something supposedly ‘good’ so you can stand back and make everyone take notice of what a ‘big’ heart you have, stooping down to give a helping hand to a group of underprivileged kids?”

  Okay, now he was making her angry, she thought, trying to rein in her temper.

  “What I ‘get’ out of it,” she informed him with a touch of irritation in her voice, “is the satisfaction of knowing that because I helped a kid who would otherwise be doomed to a life of menial, insignificant jobs, they can actually make something of him or herself, can achieve their full potential and maybe, just maybe, be able to reach for those stars they could only dream about up to now.”

  “In other words, you want to be somebody’s fairy godmother?” Trevor asked mockingly.

  Now she was feeling a white-hot anger. What right did he have to presume that just because he’d been around her these past few years, occasionally grunting a greeting in her direction, that he knew anything about her? About what motivated her, what made her tick? He was being a jerk. And maybe trying to get her mad on purpose—or to distract himself from another very real crisis.

  “What I want,” she informed him tersely, “is to be somebody’s path to hope.”

  “What do you know about hope?” Trevor challenged. “You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth.”

  It was growing dark, but he could still see her eyes flash in response to his statement. Almost against his will, he found the sight—and her—compelling. Her fire was drawing him in.

  “What I know, Mr. Garth,” she informed him, “is that there, for the grace of God, go I.”

  He scowled at her before looking back on the road. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What it means is that although we can’t choose our parents and I was lucky enough to be born a Colton, I could have just as easily been born to poverty.” She might have looked innocent, but she was far from it when it came to knowing the kind of man her father was and had been. “Given my father’s penchant in his younger years to bed any woman with a pulse, I could have easily been born to some poor woman who my father discarded the minute someone else caught his eye, leaving me unacknowledged and, more important, without the promise of any kind of a future.”

  She noted that he was quiet. Had she finally managed to get through to Trevor? Having got to know him somewhat, she had her doubts about that.

  “That’s what I think of when I see those kids who have something extra, something special, and because of family circumstances, they’re forced to drop out of school to help put food on the table and a roof over their family’s heads. If you find that self-serving, well, I can’t help the way you think. I can only do what I feel is right
,” she informed him.

  Gabby saw the half smile creep onto his lips. Still angry at Trevor’s presumptions, she shot a single word at him. “What?”

  Trevor shook his head, amused and taken with what he’d just witnessed. “You’re something to watch when you get a fire in your belly, you know that?”

  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.