to try to stop the driver, but the bullet skipped off the roof of the SUV just as it darted around his truck.
And the kidnappers sped away.
Reed finished his call with the sheriff and watched as the medic put the bandage on Addison’s head. She didn’t even react. She had her attention solely on the baby cradled in her arms. The little girl seemed to be sleeping peacefully now, but Emily still occasionally sucked the bottle that the nurse had made for her.
The medic had cleaned away the blood from Addison’s forehead, but there was a dark blue bruise already forming. The same color as her troubled eyes.
“Any sign of the kidnappers?” Addison asked the moment Reed put his phone away. She was still ash pale except for that bruise, and along with the relief of being safe at the hospital, he could also see the fear etched on her face.
Reed had to shake his head. “Not yet. But everyone’s out looking for them. Plus, there’s a CSI team headed out to your place. They might find some prints or DNA to tell us who they were.”
After all, Reed had shot one of them, so there’d be blood in the backyard. If the guy was in the system, then they could get a match, and in Reed’s experience, once they had a name, they could start figuring out what had gone on. People generally didn’t commit assorted felonies, including attempted kidnapping and murder, for no reason.
“Thank you,” Addison told Reed when the medic walked away. “You saved our lives.”
True, but only because they’d gotten lucky by being in the right place at the right time. Reed hated it’d taken something as fragile as luck to make that happen.
Luck might not be on their side again.
After the SUV sped away, his lawman’s instincts had been for him to turn his truck around and go in pursuit, but it would have been too big a risk. Those gunmen could have started shooting again. Reed wanted to catch the dirtbags, but he hadn’t wanted to do that by putting Addison, the baby and even Colt in further danger.
Even though the adrenaline was still pumping through him, Reed forced himself to sit down next to Addison in the E.R. examining stall. Over the past year he’d completely avoided any contact with his ex, and she’d done the same with him. But this wasn’t personal now.
He repeated that to himself.
Funny, but it always felt personal with Addison, and that wasn’t personal in a good way. Too many old, bad memories were in the mix, too.
Before the split, they’d been married for nearly three years, had dated five years before that, but their long relationship had soured big-time when Addison pressed and pressed him to have kids.
And they’d tried despite his reservations about fatherhood and the strain that pregnancy would put on her body.
However, her infertility had only added to their differences. One failed in vitro procedure after another, and they’d finally pulled the plug a year ago on both the baby plans and the marriage, and he had filed for a divorce. Addison had moved to San Antonio, and Reed had thought he might never see her again.
Clearly, he’d been wrong about that, because here she was and apparently in a boatload of trouble.
“I was only going to be here a few weeks,” Addison volunteered. “Just enough time to get the place ready to sell. If they’d come after me while I was at my apartment in San Antonio, they might have succeeded in taking her.”
It was true, but Reed didn’t bother confirming it. Addison was already shaken up enough. “Did the P.I., Blake Rooney, visit you at your apartment?”
She nodded. “He came earlier this week.”
Reed didn’t like the timing of that. “Did you tell him you were coming to your late aunt’s place here in Sweetwater Springs?”
Addison shook her head, at first, but then the alarm went through her eyes. “He saw my suitcases and baby things and asked if I was going on a trip. I told him I’d inherited a house and was going to sell it. You think Rooney had something to do with those kidnappers?”
“Maybe. Colt’s trying to contact him now,” Reed explained. “We’ll make sure he’s okay and bring him in for questioning.”
It was possible Rooney had indeed suspected something illegal about Emily’s adoption or had even been a part of it. That was Reed’s top theory now. But it must have been many steps past being bad for someone to send three armed men to steal whatever the P.I. had discovered.
Or to learn what Addison might have done.
If she had indeed participated in an illegal adoption, then someone might have wanted to cover it up. The problem was she might not even have known she’d done anything illegal. That meant Addison would need to be questioned thoroughly to make sure everything was aboveboard.
The door to the examining room opened, and a nurse stuck her head in. “You’ll be able to go soon. Just waiting on the paperwork from the doctor.”
Soon couldn’t come soon enough for Reed. He needed to put some space between Addison and him, but that wouldn’t happen until he started to get some answers to all those questions he had.
“Why’d you decide to go ahead and adopt a baby?” Reed asked, figuring it was a simple enough question and a good way to go back to the beginning. “Being a single parent couldn’t have been an easy decision for you.”
Something flashed through Addison’s eyes. Maybe because this wasn’t exactly a safe subject for them. After all, it’d been at the root of their breakup.
“I’m thirty-four and decided not to wait any longer for the right fertility treatment,” she finally answered. “Or wait for Mr. Right, for that matter. Haven’t had much luck in that department.”
She paused just long enough for him to understand he was in the Mr. Wrong category, but Reed hadn’t needed the pause to get that.
“You know how much I’ve always wanted to be a mom,” she added a moment later.
He did, and that said it all. Addison had wanted it and had gone for it. But maybe in going for it, she had cut the wrong kinds of corners.
“If you hired Rooney, you must have suspected something wasn’t right,” Reed tossed out there.
She got that look in her eyes again, as if this was the last thing on earth she wanted to discuss. Tough. They were discussing it.
“Not suspected. But I was worried,” she explained, “because of all the things I was hearing.”
Yeah, he got that, too. The black-market baby rings had been all over the news. Pregnant women had been kidnapped and their babies sold. In some cases, the birth mothers had been murdered, but others had escaped. Maybe Addison had wanted to make sure one of those escapees wasn’t Emily’s real birth mother. If so, that birth mother could step in and take Emily from her long after the adoption had been finalized.
“Could
