“Just go away and forget about your real daughter, who doesn’t have red rubber boots or a real mommy to take her trick or treating?”
Fury gripped her at his callousness. She tried to shove him off the arm of the chair. “You bastard.”
To her shock, he grabbed her in an attempt to gain his balance and landed on top of her in the chair, his chest pressed against hers, his nose inches from her face. She could feel the steely hardness of his muscled body and smell the scents of citrus and sea salt on his skin.
Even his teeth were Hollywood perfect. “You’re not thinking straight,” he said bluntly. “I saw you in the yard with Keely. I know if you thought you had a child out there, you’d move heaven and earth to get her back.”
Stef felt hot tears slip onto her face. Her stomach knotted as she tried to imagine the face of the little girl the kidnapper had described, who’d come from her womb. Yes, in her mother’s heart she desperately wanted her child. But all she could see was Keely’s face—the beloved little girl whom she’d fed and changed, and whose voice was the sound of happiness. She elbowed Mitch in the ribs. “Get off me!”
Oh, God, this wasn’t happening!
“Are you going to take Keely from me?” she demanded as he levered himself off her.
Stef saw the stark truth in his face before he could shutter his expression.
“That’s not my job. My concern is finding out whether the child being held is your daughter and getting her back safely. I’ll need a DNA sample from you. And I’ll need something that might have your husband’s DNA on it.”
“Like what? I have some of Brad’s things stored away that I thought Keely might find comforting to have,” she said, trying to bend her mind to comprehend the sickening thought that her flesh-and-blood child had been in the care of kidnappers for the past thirty months. Her heart jerked. Had her child been neglected? Or abused?
“Did you keep a jacket or a ball cap? Something that may have come in contact with his neck, wrist or forehead is more likely to have his DNA on it.”
“I’ll see what I can find.” She forced herself to stand and brush past his towering frame. On stiff legs, she marched to the alcove to get Keely. She wasn’t leaving Mitch Halloran alone with her daughter.
Her daughter. A sob clawed up her throat. Even if another DNA test proved Keely really was the Collingwood heir, she couldn’t accept for a moment that Keely wouldn’t be in her life forever. As soon as this was over, she’d get a lawyer. Surely no judge in the country would take a baby away from the woman who’d raised it if the biological parents were dead?
But this isn’t any baby, insinuated a doom-and-gloom voice in her mind that sounded remarkably like Mitch Halloran’s blunt-edged baritone. Her sunshiney daughter who loved to dance and sing and bake cookies was the Collingwood heir—the heir to one of the largest family fortunes in the United States.
Who was she kidding?
Stef stopped in the arched doorway to the alcove, overwhelmed by the battle she was up against. Keely, the delightful center of her universe, was pretending to feed toy plastic fruits to a doll. “Eat, baby, eat,” she chanted. She glanced up and saw Stef and her blue-green eyes rounded with empathy.
“Mommy—sad?”
Stef sank onto the floor and pulled Keely into her lap, committing to memory the tropical scent of her hair, the perfect peanut shape of her nose and the snug heaven-on-earth feel of her compact body. How could she bear losing this darling child? “Mommy’s very sad, Kee. But when I hold you everything’s better.”
To Stef’s dismay, Keely started to sing their “I love you” song. The tears Stef had been struggling to hold back burst out in a torrent.
She rocked Keely tightly in her arms. “I love you, too, baby. I love you, too.”
SHE WAS CRYING.
Mitch stiffened as his every muscle tried to deflect the sound of Stephanie Shelton’s anguished sobs. His stomach felt as if it were coated with hot tar. The only thing that made the situation bearable was the hope that she’d soon be reunited with her own lost child.
Mitch knew what a gift a mother like her would be to that child. Everything his own mother had never been.
He’d give Stef a few more minutes, then gently prod her into action. Time wasn’t on their side—there was no way of knowing when the kidnapper would again make contact with specific instructions for the ransom. For all they knew, whoever had switched Riana and Keely could have another plan in the works to switch them back.
Flexing the tight muscles in his shoulders, Mitch unclipped the cell phone from his belt and punched in The Guardian’s phone number.
“The Guardian,” G.D.’s militarily brusque voice said.
Mitch’s lips curled in wry humor. Uncomfortable with his new boss’s curt directive to address him as sir, he’d quickly dubbed The Guardian “G.D.,” which stood for goddamn. As in goddamn he couldn’t believe he’d handed in his gun and his badge because The Guardian had asked him for assistance with this case.
Mitch had wanted to be a detective since he was twelve, when he’d gone to live with his grandfather who worked as a janitor in the Parker Administration Building of the L.A.P.D.
On days when Paddy’s back had pained him from his shrapnel injury—a nasty souvenir from the Korean War—Mitch would come along to pick up wastebaskets and mop the floors in the Detective Headquarters Division. He’d never thought about not being a police detective. He’d thought he’d probably drag his last breath on the streets of L.A.—a fitting way to go for the life he’d chosen.
Mitch angled a surreptitious glance at Stef who was guiding Keely toward the bedrooms. His heart tightened at the paleness of her face and the moist path of tears on her cheek. For the first time in two years he had no doubt whatsoever that he was right where he was supposed to be.
He could almost hear Paddy telling him to keep soldiering on. It never gets any easier, son.
His chest filled with an echo of longing for the gruff man who’d given him the only home he’d ever known. Who’d given him clumsily wrapped Christmas presents and had taken him to Dodger games to celebrate his birthdays where he’d slipped Mitch sips of his beer. They were not the kind of memories that made sappy movies, but they were incredibly precious to a kid starved for attention.
Mitch realized his thoughts were drifting when G.D.’s voice rumbled, “Who’s calling?”
He snapped back into focus. “Operation Bassinet. It’s Halloran, G.D. I just spoke to Mrs. Shelton. She’s devastated, but she’s on board.”
Concern edged The Guardian’s tone. “Is Riana okay?”
“Right as rain. We should be back in the city tonight. By the way, the husband is dead. Two years ago. In a rock climbing accident. Think there’s anything fishy in that? It could be a coincidence, but whoever abducted Riana from the hospital knew how to rappel.”
When Mitch had accepted the job one day after the ransom demand had been received, The Guardian had apprised him of the details of Riana’s kidnapping. The suspect was a Caucasian male who’d
