face, it wasn’t hard to see the doubt go through his eyes. Despite the doubts, though, he still had a look around them. A cop’s look. Good. Lauren didn’t want anyone sneaking up on them. Or worse—trying to sneak into the house.
“What do those men have to do with me?” he snarled.
“Maybe everything.”
She tried to gather her breath. Couldn’t. Cameron wasn’t overly muscled, but he wasn’t a lightweight, either, and with his chest pressing against her, she couldn’t get enough air. He must have realized that, but he didn’t move. Probably because he thought she would go for her gun again.
Which she would.
Since there was no easy way to say this, Lauren just blurted it out. “I believe someone swapped my baby with Gilly’s.”
She gave him a moment to let that sink in, but she couldn’t give him the time he needed. She also continued to keep watch as best she could. Hard to do that, though, while on the ground.
He shook his head. “Why would anyone do that?”
“I’m not sure. Please, let’s just check on Isaac, and then we can go over all of this.”
Cameron didn’t answer. Not with words anyway. But his cold, hard stare told her that wasn’t going to happen.
“Someone started following me days ago. Two men in a dark car,” she added. “I believe those were the same men who broke into my house.”
“The men who tried to kill you.” Cameron said it as if he didn’t believe her. She couldn’t blame him. She’d had hours to try to come to grips with it, and part of her still wasn’t ready to accept it.
She nodded. “Before they found me, I heard them talking to someone on a communicator, and that’s when they said they were cops.”
“They could have lied,” he reminded her again.
“True. But they still broke in for a reason. And that reason was my son, Patrick. They wanted to kill me and take him.” She huffed in frustration because his skeptical look was only getting worse, and she wasn’t explaining this well at all. “Just please move off me so we can both keep watch.”
She saw him debate that for several moments. Lauren had lost track of how long she’d been out here with him, but Dara, the nanny, would be getting even more worried than she already was.
“If you try anything else stupid, I will put you right back on the ground,” Cameron growled.
He finally shifted his body to the side, rolling off her. He also snatched up her gun as he stood. Lauren didn’t like not being armed, but at least when she got up, she was able to better keep an eye on the trail behind them.
“Does your nephew look like your sister?” she came out and asked.
He stopped glancing around long enough to shoot her a glare. “That proves nothing. He could have inherited genes from generations ago.”
Lauren hesitated a moment. “Does he look like me?”
His quick glare intensified, but what he didn’t do was deny it. “First, you have to convince me that a swap even took place before I’ll start speculating about who my nephew does or doesn’t resemble.”
Fair enough. Or at least it would have been fair if time was on their side. She instinctively knew it wasn’t.
“I was telling the truth when I said I can’t be sure a swap took place, but the men said once they had Patrick, they could do a DNA test and go from there. Go from there,” she emphasized. “I believe that means they’ll come here next.”
Cameron cursed, and it wasn’t tame. “That’s a big leap to assume the men were talking about Isaac.”
“A leap except that I’d already started to get suspicious. Patrick doesn’t look like me or my late husband.” She swallowed hard. “He looks like you.”
She could tell from his slight flinch that Cameron reacted to that. Maybe because he saw something of her face in Isaac’s?
“Gilly could have arranged the swap,” Lauren went on. “She was afraid of Trace, and if she knew she was dying, this might have been her way of preventing Trace from getting his hands on their child.”
Though it sickened her to think that Gilly, a woman she considered her friend, would have intentionally done something like this since it could have put Lauren’s own precious son in danger.
“Gilly wouldn’t do that,” Cameron insisted. “If she was worried about her baby’s safety, she would have gotten word to me.”
“Maybe. But Gilly was dying. Scared. And they’d had trouble getting in touch with you.”
He flinched again, and she knew why. Cameron had gotten caught up in a lockdown at the prison, where he’d gone to interview a potential witness. He’d been trapped there for hours with no way to leave and get to his sister even though she’d gone into labor.
“But Gilly might not have done this,” Lauren added a moment later.
Mercy, she wished she’d rehearsed this or something because it was hard for her to put her line of thinking into words. Equally hard for her to imagine it had happened. “My late husband was Alden Lange, and his business partner or his sister could be the one responsible. They both hate me. Or at least they hate that I have control over Alden’s estate.”
The flat look Cameron gave her told her he wasn’t buying that. And she hoped she was wrong. Because both Alden’s sister, Julia, and his partner, Duane Tulley, could be very dangerous. They might have seen this as some sick mind game to watch her suffer. Of course, her suffering could also be profitable for them if it led to one or both of them getting their hands on Alden’s money.
“How would Trace or any of these other people have gotten into the hospital nursery to switch babies?” he asked.
Lauren didn’t have the answer to that, either. “It must have been an inside job since the babies wear bracelets with security chips that would trigger an alarm if they were carried out of the hospital. I’d just started checking out the medical staff when I was attacked.”
He made a sound, a rumble deep in his throat. “And why did you do that? What made you suspicious?”
“I kept thinking it was strange that I would look at my son and see you.” She waved that off before he could say anything about it. She didn’t want to talk about why the image of Cameron’s face was still so clear in her head after all these years and after all the bad stuff that’d gone on between them.
“I had a DNA test done,” she went on. “So I could compare Patrick’s DNA to mine. I’m supposed to get the results back any day now, but I made the mistake of asking the housekeeper if there was anything still around with Alden’s DNA on it.” She’d cursed herself for doing that. “I wanted to have the complete DNA results, but I think the housekeeper told Alden’s sister what I’d asked for.”
At least Cameron hadn’t simply dismissed her. He tipped his head to the trail. “We’ll get your son and sort this out.” Lauren was about
