Josh. Delores Fossen
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jerks came running to make sure she was still there.
Definitely a blind spot.
“Stay low,” she whispered to Josh, “and go in there.”
Jaycee tipped her head to the stall. She had to get him out of the yard because the guard would soon be making a sweep of that area. Maybe he wouldn’t come upon the backup that Josh had hopefully brought with him. If Josh had come alone, well, they were in trouble.
Without making a sound, Josh slipped through the bottom part of the door and into the stall.
“Keep your voice at a whisper,” she warned him, angling her head away from the camera. She couldn’t do that for long, either, or it would prompt another look-see from the guard. “There’s a listening device on the post by the camera, but I’ve crammed bits of hay in it to muffle the sound.”
She was sure he heard what she said, but his smoky blue eyes were planted firmly on her stomach.
Oh, that.
She owed him an answer to his question.
Since she’d first eyed that little plus sign on the home pregnancy test over four months ago, she’d wondered how she would spill this news. Josh wasn’t exactly a family man. Thirty-four and had never even lived with a woman or been engaged. Jaycee didn’t consider herself a relationship expert, but she figured that meant he hadn’t planned on becoming a father this year.
And she didn’t care.
This was her baby. She’d spent the last three and a half months protecting it, and she didn’t intend to stop now. The only thing she needed from Josh was his help in getting them all the heck out of there.
Jaycee moved back to the door, propped her shoulder against the frame and pretended to examine the split ends on her hair. She spent a lot of time pretending to do mundane things that concealed her eyes and mouth just so the guards wouldn’t be alerted that she was looking for a way out of this Hades of a prison.
“Well?” Josh prompted.
Since an answer to that question would only waste time and distract him, Jaycee went in a different direction. One that would fully occupy his lawman’s attention.
She hoped.
“There are four guards total,” she explained. “At least two are on watch at all times. And right now, there’s a doctor inside. He’s already given me and the two women here checkups, but he’ll examine the other four women who are also being held captive in the house.”
She risked a glance at Josh, and judging from the way he looked at her—as if she’d lost her bloomin’ mind—he hadn’t known those details.
“You did know about the captives, right?” she asked. “And that this is a baby farm, and they’re holding us against our will?”
He shook his head.
That sucked the breath right out of her.
He didn’t know. So why the devil was he here?
Josh shucked off his black Stetson and generally looked as if he wanted to throw up in it. That only lasted a split second, and he became the tough FBI agent again.
Or rather the hot cowboy cop.
That wasn’t an FBI shield on his rawhide belt. It was some kind of local badge. And he was wearing jeans and a denim shirt that looked as if he’d been born to wear them. Ditto for the rumpled chocolate-brown hair. Definitely not FBI regulation length. Later, if she got the chance, she’d tell him that it suited him.
Later, she’d tell him a lot of things.
And maybe he would listen.
Josh eased his phone from his pocket and fired off a text. “Will these men kill you if you try to escape?” he mouthed.
“Oh, yeah.” She didn’t have to think about that.
Jaycee had had enough experience with killers to know one when she saw one, and the guards were killers. She figured their boss was, too, though she’d yet to lay eyes on him. What she wanted to do was put a gun to his head and pull the trigger a couple of times. Harsh, yes, but he’d put a lot of women and babies through way too much misery.
“They’ve had me for three and a half months.” She glanced at the other two women, who were pretending to do anything but look at her. “My Spanish sucks, but from what I’ve gathered, they were here about a month before I arrived.”
“How’d this happen? How did they take you? Why did they take you?”
All good questions. Too bad her answers were somewhat lacking.
She moved to another section of her hair for the fake split-ends check. “I was coming out of a clinic after an OB visit. Another woman was walking out with me. Someone I didn’t know. But she was close to her delivery date, and we were talking. Two men grabbed her. When I tried to help her, they hit us with Tasers.”
Those memories were almost too painful to recall, but Jaycee had tried to brand every detail into her brain so she could catch the monsters once she was able to get free.
And she would catch them.
“I don’t know what happened to the other woman,” Jaycee continued. Again, a painful memory that clawed at her. She hadn’t been able to save her, and now heaven knew what had happened to her and her baby.
“Why did they take you?” he repeated, his attention on her belly again.
“From what I’ve been able to find out, they kidnap women or force them into surrogacy and then sell the babies on the black market.”
She let go of the hunk of her hair and moved on to nail-biting to cover the movement of her mouth. Except she was shaking enough that nail-biting didn’t exactly seem like a pretense.
“They don’t appear to know I’m an agent,” Jaycee added.
And that was probably the only reason she was still alive.
This operation might not be huge, more like a sicko cottage industry, but it carried with it all sorts of felony charges. If the brains behind this thought she was FBI, they might not let her draw another breath.
And that would mean her baby wouldn’t stand a chance.
Or maybe they knew she was an agent and were planning to use that in some way. Maybe to get information from her.
Josh’s phone vibrated, and he glanced at the screen before answering it. “We’re going to need a lot of backup,” he whispered to the caller. “This is a black-market baby ring. At least four armed guards in the house. Four captives, too, and another three captives here in the barn.”
Jaycee couldn’t hear a word of what the caller said, and Josh’s body-language clues shut down, too. No more emotion in his eyes.
Sometimes, like now, she got just a flash of the heat that’d once been between them.
Okay, more than a flash.
She got a full shot of the attraction that’d landed them in bed. Of course, with Josh’s alarmingly handsome looks and long and lanky body, the attraction was a given. Even after all the bad that’d gone on between them.
He dropped his phone back in his shirt pocket and got into a crouching position. His gun ready. She hoped he had some kind of backup weapon that he could let her use.
“When I tell you and the women to get down, do it.” Even though Josh whispered that order, it had some snarl to it. As if he’d considered that she might refuse. At this point, she wasn’t refusing anything that would get her and all the captives out.
Jaycee managed a nod under the guise of more nail-biting, and since she didn’t know what Josh’s plan was, she stayed put. Waiting.
Praying, too.
“Is that baby mine?” he whispered.