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.
She’d been expecting the question, of course, but Jaycee wasn’t prepared for the suddenly clammy hands and her knees locking.
“Yes,” she said.
She purposely didn’t look at Josh because if he had another wave of nausea or some other unmanly response, he wouldn’t want her to witness it. And besides, she didn’t need the distraction of his response, either. Apparently, something was about to happen, something that would require her to shout to Marita and Blanca to get down before she did the same.
Something that would likely be dangerous.
Later, Josh and she could talk about the baby. Yelling would no doubt be part of that discussion, but for now, everything inside her screamed for her to do something—anything—to help with this escape.
And soon.
Jaycee felt useless standing there and waiting. Fortunately, she’d had a lot of practice with that during the past months, and she’d learned some other things that Josh needed to know.
“As far as I can tell,” she whispered, “there are no working exterior cameras, and the computer inside the house seems to be rigged just to monitor the camera here in the barn and our ankle bracelets.”
“How long will the doctor be here?” he asked. It was a logical question, no hint of the baby bombshell she’d just dropped on him.
“Maybe awhile. I think one of the women inside is in labor.”
That brought on some muttered profanity from Josh. With good reason. It would be hard to escape with a woman delivering a baby. As it was, it’d be difficult for some of the women to run for cover. At least Marita, Blanca and she weren’t megapregnant, and they all appeared to be in decent shape.
It seemed as if time practically came to a stop. Jaycee couldn’t say the same for her breathing. It was gusting now, and there were beads of sweat on her face. The camera wouldn’t pick up the sweat, but the breathing would no doubt alert one of the bald goons.
As would her continued stay near the door.
Soon, very soon, one of them would show up to make sure she wasn’t up to no good and to order her back to her cot.
Hoping to buy them some time from the guard check, Jaycee partially closed the back door, leaving just a one-inch gap—the way it usually stayed during the day. At night, the guards locked them in with deadbolts. She went back in the direction of the cot but didn’t sit.
Best to stay on her feet, ready to react.
Marita and Blanca obviously picked up on her nonverbal cues. Maybe the verbal ones, too, if they’d heard Josh and her whispering. Blanca studied her from over the top of her paperback, and Marita kept volleying glances between Jaycee and the movie that she obviously wasn’t watching.
Finally, Jaycee saw the movement in the gap in the back door. Not one of the guards. This was another cowboy with a badge. She got just a glimpse of him, but he had the same hair coloring and body build as Josh. A strong enough resemblance that this could be his brother.
The man peeked in, his gaze briefly connecting with Josh’s, and Josh motioned for her to move to the door. She did, though Jaycee tried not to give anything away that the guards would detect.
“It’s hot in here, huh?” she
