Desert Ice Daddy Read online

  Same as she’d used on him just minutes ago.

  Which stung, because, by God, he had never betrayed her. “You can trust me.”

  He waited for some acknowledgment, anything. A nod.

  She was looking at the ground again.

  He let another couple of seconds pass before he grabbed up the briefcases. The dust the choppers had blown around tasted bitter in his mouth as it grated between his teeth. “Let’s get back. There’s nothing more we can do here.”

  He carried both briefcases, slowed his gait to hers. On the way here, he could barely keep up. But now she walked as if all life had been sucked out of her. He hated that he’d been here and hadn’t been able to do anything. To have her son within arm’s reach then lose him again was obviously killing her.

  Emotions swirled in his gut, rage against Jake Kenner and the rest of his cronies. Rage that had no outlet, because they weren’t here. His heart broke for Christopher. The kid had to be scared to death. And Akeem was scared for him, to be honest. Added to that was another emotion, for Taylor. But Taylor wouldn’t let him comfort her. She was shutting him out.

  He stole a look at her face, and it was etched in misery.

  “As long as we still have the money, they won’t hurt him,” he said. Unless they’d gotten spooked by the cops and decided to call off the whole operation, cut their losses before they were caught. He wouldn’t tell her that, but it was something he had to prepare for.

  The walk to the Navigator seemed twice as long. And gained them little. He took in the shot-up tires, every single one of them, and recalled the pickup that had taken off this way. They wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.

  “Let’s get inside. The air conditioner will still be working.”

  “Are we stuck here?” She broke out of her numb state only long enough to ask that. She slid into her seat while he tossed the briefcases in the back.

  “The cops know where we are. They’ll come and get us when we don’t show up back at the ranch. They’ll come to investigate the scene of the shootout, anyway. There are cars on their way, I’m sure. The choppers just got here ahead of them.”

  He reached for the Thermos first thing after he walked around from the back and got in, and now he emptied the contents to the ground before closing the car door, starting the engine and turning on the air conditioner. Then he took the damn Thermos apart. Was it possible they’d been bugged and tracked?

  “Why would Gary talk? I told him what would happen if he…” She bit back the rest, fingering the Thermos’s top, her eyes red-rimmed.

  “Could be the cops went around to his place again after I left him yesterday. Maybe they had more questions and he cracked under pressure. Or maybe he didn’t trust me with you and Christopher.”

  He took the silver insert out, but found nothing between that and the outer shell, nothing in the cap. He put the cap back on and tossed the whole thing to the floor in the back. The transmitter didn’t really matter at this stage. The damage was done.

  “He didn’t trust me,” she said. “He wanted to be here. I should have—” She shook her head.

  The half-finished sentence had him clenching his jaw. She should have what? Come with Gary? Because that drunk idiot would have been better than Akeem? Because he was her ex and the boy’s father? Because Akeem had no business being here with her?

  And what if she was right? That thought had him clenching his teeth harder. Because he had failed. They didn’t have Christopher.

  “Whatever happened, happened. We are going to focus on what we need to do to have the best outcome of what happens next.”

  Inshallah, his uncles would have said. Accept Allah’s will in everything; they had told him that countless times during those four years he had spent with his grandfather in the Arabian Desert after his mother’s death. Trust in Allah and keep your camels watered. In other words, don’t worry about things you have no power to change, but be prepared.

  “I’ll call Flint.” She pulled the cell phone from her back pocket, pushed some buttons, furrowed her brow. “I can’t make a call.” Frustration crackled in her voice. “I think it’s fixed so that they can call me, but I can’t call anyone.” Then the anger seemed to drain out of her as she went pale the next moment. “Do you think he got hurt?”

  There had been some blood in the dirt, which she might or might not have seen. Akeem sure as anything wasn’t going to bring it up.

  “No way.” He reached for her hand, but she pulled away almost immediately. The car was filled with the tension between them.

  “The cops wouldn’t shoot anywhere near him,” he said to set her at ease. “And the kidnappers were aiming up, at the choppers. No way any of them could have hit him by accident.”

  A few moments passed while she stared blankly through the windshield. Then her chest rose with the deep breath she drew. Her eyes hardened as she pulled herself straighter in her seat and turned to him at last. “We are going to get him back.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  A long moment passed with silent communication, acknowledging what had happened as well as the need to move past it for Christopher’s sake.

  “I hate just sitting here,” she said.

  Which didn’t turn out to be a long-term problem. The cell phone in her back pocket rang the next second.

  “SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR SON,” the voice on the other end was shouting.

  “Please don’t do this.” Instantly, adrenaline was racing through her veins, clenching her whole body together. Fear clasped her heart, blood drumming in her ears. “Please.” She swallowed her tears and struggled for control. She needed to remain coherent. “I didn’t talk to the cops, I swear. Please. I don’t know how they found us. I’m still here. I still have the money.” That was what they needed. She had to keep reminding them of that.

  “You made a big mistake,” the voice sneered, still hard with anger. “It’s over.”

  The world disappeared from around her for a second, her vision fading to black before coming back again. Christopher was her life. She couldn’t lose Christopher.

  “Please,” she begged, crying now. “I have the money. You’ll get everything you want.”

  A long silence followed on the other end of the line. She held her breath, unsure if the man was still there or if he’d tossed the phone without bothering to click it off.

  But then words came that allowed her lungs to fill with air again. “I’ll call you back tomorrow. If you go within a mile of another cop, your little bastard will be dead.”

  “Is he hurt? How is he? Let me talk to him,” she pleaded but he did click off this time. The line was dead.

  She let her head drop onto the dashboard and struggled with her tears and for control for long minutes before she could collect herself enough to tell Akeem what had happened.

  “We better get out of here.” He was opening his door already.

  “How?” There was no way they could fix the car.

  “On foot. You can bet that sooner or later the cops will show up. And when they do, they’ll have plenty of questions for us. If the kidnappers are monitoring us somehow…” He looked around and scanned the horizon. “It’d be better for now if we kept our distance from the police.” He slid to the ground. “We don’t want the kidnappers to see us anywhere near the cops.”

  “Where are we going?” She followed him to the back where he was unloading some serious gear: two large duffel bags.

  He grabbed the first-aid kit from the backseat and shoved it into one of them. “Back to the boulders.”

  “Are we going to spend the night out here? What’s in those bags?” she asked.

  “Supplies I usually carry when I ride out to camp. I put them in this morning—I didn’t even know why I was putting them in at the time.” He shook his head.

  Camping. He did that now and then, rode out to Hell’s Porch for days at a time. Flint had told her that. She wondered if he missed the times he’d spent with his grandfather in th
e desert, although he’d always been tight-lipped about those years. He’d never forgiven his grandfather for the way the old sheik had treated his mother.

  “So, how well do you know this place?”

  “I know some of it.” He swung the bags over his shoulders. “It’s too vast to be thoroughly known by any one man.”

  She could certainly believe that. “Won’t the police come to the boulders, too?” she asked after a moment, surprised that they weren’t there already. Probably still following the pickups.

  “Probably, but I want to take another look at the tracks. We need to be going in some direction, might as well follow one of the tracks and at least have a chance of ending up somewhere close to Christopher.”

  That made sense. She could almost forgive him for keeping her from Christopher back there. Almost. “I’ll carry something, too,” she offered.

  “The money.”

  He handed her the briefcases, and she grabbed them, ignoring when their fingers brushed together.

  She couldn’t think of anything else on the way back to the boulders but of the shootout, of Christopher, of how close they’d been and how scared he must be. She didn’t cry. Energy expended on crying would be much better used for fighting for her son when they reached him again.

  “He probably wasn’t in the first pickup,” Akeem said once they reached the boulders and he’d dropped the bags. He was walking around in a wide circle. “They knew a chopper would take off after that.”

  “And I doubt he was in the last,” she said. “They knew we would be staying here, waiting.”

  “The first truck went this way.” He pointed. “The last pickup drove that way.”

  “And the one that went the way we came passed right by us. It didn’t have Christopher.”

  “Right.” Akeem nodded. “And it wasn’t driven by Jake Kenner. I have a feeling he would stick with the boy since Christopher knows him. He’d have the easiest time getting Christopher to do what they wanted.”

  She bit her lips at that. “So that leaves us with two sets of tracks.” After the fight she’d been looking for nothing else but a chance to find Christopher’s shoe prints in the dust. Now she registered the shells and the bullet holes drilled into the boulders all around them.

  And the blood. But not where Christopher had stood. She gave God thanks for that.

  She nudged a spent shell with the tip of her shoe as the realization came, and she took her time digesting it, accepting it. Akeem hadn’t been holding her back from Christopher. He’d been saving her life.

  “We have a fifty-fifty chance. Either this way, or that.” He circled back and hooked his bags over his shoulders again. “You choose. But we better get going before the cops get here.”

  HER ARMS WERE BREAKING, but Taylor wouldn’t have let go of the briefcases for anything. They meant Christopher’s life.

  Akeem carried the duffel bags without complaint, dragging a large sagebrush behind them to cover their tracks. If the cops found them, they could mess up the exchange once again. She didn’t think she would get another chance from the kidnappers.

  As if by unspoken agreement, they talked about things unrelated to the current situation. Not that she could shut her mind off from obsessing over every second of the failed exchange, or over what would happen when the next call came in.

  “So you like it at Diamondback?” Akeem asked. “Settling in?”

  “I don’t want to get too settled in. I want to get my own place eventually, but I’m loving it.”

  “Flint loves having you there.”

  “Flint wants to wrap me up in cotton and keep me in a velvet box.” She gave a wry smile. She couldn’t blame her brother, really. She’d messed up with her marriage pretty badly. But the solution was not to trade Gary’s obsessive need to control her for Flint’s obsessive protection, or any other man’s. Her goal was to make it on her own, stand on her own two feet and show the world, herself and her son that she was done being a victim. Taylor McKade was a strong, independent woman.

  “Nothing wrong with Flint wanting to take care of you and look out for you,” Akeem was saying.

  “Spoken like a true sheik.”

  He gave her an unreadable look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “How many wives did your grandfather keep locked away in his harem?” she teased.

  “I’m not my grandfather.” His voice had an edge all of a sudden.

  It made her do a double take. Touchy subject? “I know. I didn’t mean that.” She stopped and set the briefcases down to rest her arms for a second. “You never talk about him.”

  He shrugged and dropped the sagebrush. They were coming into an area that was all stone and little dirt, the track barely visible this close up. Nobody would be able to pick it out from a helicopter. They were safe unless the police brought dogs. “He’s dead.” His voice was toneless.

  “Flint says you refused your inheritance.”

  He said nothing to that, just swung both duffel bags over his right shoulder and picked up the two briefcases with the left and began walking again.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “He didn’t have a harem,” he said. “He had four wives, each with their own kids in their own tent.”

  “Didn’t you think that was strange when you were there?”

  “Everything was strange. The wives were the least of it. I was born and raised in Houston. Not much here prepared me for the Bedu of the desert.”

  She hadn’t known him back then. Neither had Flint. But he’d told her the few stories he’d heard from Akeem, back in the days when she had her first serious crush on him and had endlessly nagged her brother for every bit of information about his mysterious friend.

  Akeem was fourteen when his mother died, no other relatives in the States. He would have gone into the foster-care system if not for his grandfather, the sheik, who had sent for him. He’d told Flint once that he had almost refused to go. It’d been hard for him to swallow that the old sheik had cast out his mother.

  “Was it like this?” She nodded toward the barren land that surrounded them.

  “Much bigger. In some places it’s all stones, other places it’s brush like this, even grass, then there are vast areas with nothing but sand. No TV, no video games. It was a shock to my fourteen-year-old system at first.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I started to see the beauty of it, the honor of the men of the desert. I’d never seen the place before, but I still felt a connection.” He shook his head. “Can’t explain it. It was like…The best I can explain is collective memory.”

  “But you came back.”

  “First chance I got.” He gave a lopsided smile. “I’m American.”

  He was unlike any man she had ever known: strong, honorable, carried himself with dignity, had always been there for the others. Flint considered him his brother, more so than the half brother they shared and hated discussing. Like Flint, Akeem had achieved great success. But sometimes she wondered if he ever felt at home anywhere.

  She hadn’t. Not in a long time. Not even at the ranch, despite the best efforts of Flint and Lora Leigh and Lucinda.

  They walked on in silence, stopping only to drink. Akeem had brought along several bottles. Hopefully enough to last them until tomorrow.

  Tomorrow, she would get Christopher back. She had to believe that.

  They sat out the noon heat under a group of acacia trees and talked about his business. When the temperature cooled to bearable, they resumed walking again. They stopped for the night early, could have walked more given the light but decided it was better to save some energy for the next day. Who knew what it would require of them?

  She helped him pitch the tent. They ate cold rations of smoked meat, bread and apples, courtesy of Lucinda, then drank sparingly.

  “Should we light a fire?” she asked, not that it was that cold yet, but might get chilly toward dawn. Unless, by some miracle, Flint found them. He would be loo
king if they didn’t get back to the ranch in a couple of hours.

  “Better not.”

  Which meant, heaven help her, that they were going to have to snuggle for heat. She wasn’t sure she was ready for that.

  Okay, so she’d thought she’d been ready back when she was seventeen, when Akeem had first come home from Aggie, Texas A&M University, with Flint on a visit. He’d starred in the overwhelming majority of her girlhood fantasies. Which culminated on that fateful night at nineteen when she’d been so summarily rejected.

  The whirling sound of a helicopter interrupted the flow of memories before they could have made her blush.

  AKEEM WATCHED AS TAYLOR cocked her head, her blond hair falling in waves over her shoulder.

  “Police?” she asked.

  “Either that or one of Jackson’s choppers, or Flint’s Falcon. We shouldn’t call attention to ourselves until we know for sure.”

  The tent was small and a nondescript beige color that blended into the desert like camouflage. There were bushes around that were bigger. They had a fair chance that they might be mistaken for another boulder from a distance.

  But as the chopper dipped low to scan the flat land, it did come to hover right on top of them. Akeem looked through the mosquito netting of the window. “Cops.”

  “Oh, man.”

  He waited for them to set down, trying to figure out what to say. They were about to catch some serious trouble for not telling the authorities about the ransom demand, for coming here alone. And they’d be summarily taken out of Hell’s Porch, questioned for as long as the cops saw fit. When the next call could come at any second.

  Akeem swore under his breath and got up. He would grab one of Flint’s pickups and bring Taylor back here as soon as they were let go again. It was the best they could do; no point in wasting energy on what-ifs.

  But after a moment of lingering in place, the chopper banked to the left and took off. His instincts prickled.

  “Why didn’t they stop to pick us up?” She came over to the window to look after the helicopter.