Cowboy Behind the Badge (2 page)

But there were no women.

In fact, because the lights were off, Tucker couldn't see anything other than the food on the shelves.

“I have to protect them,” Laine repeated, her voice breaking.

Tucker went closer to the pantry and looked around. On the floor was a rumpled blanket.

Except it wasn't just a blanket.

Wrapped in the center of it was something he'd never expected to find in his pantry.

Two sleeping newborn babies.

 

Chapter Two

Laine tried to brace herself for Tucker's reaction. By all accounts, he was a good lawman, so she doubted that he would just toss the babies and her out the door. It was one of the reasons she'd come to him. That, and there being literally no one else she could trust.

She wasn't sure she could trust him, either.

But she was certain that he'd do what was right for the babies.

“They need to be protected,” Laine said when Tucker just stood there volleying glances between her and the babies. “The killers will be looking for them. And for me.”

Tucker shook his head, obviously trying to process this. She wished him luck with that. She'd had more than an hour to process it, and it still didn't make sense.

“Why are you so sure the killers will be looking for you?” he snapped.

“Because if they don't know already, they'll find out I'm the person renting that office space, that it was my car the woman was hiding behind. And that I had a connection to the illegal adoption investigation.”

He made a sound of agreement with frustration mixed in. He tore his gaze from the babies. “How'd this woman know to come to you?”

“I'm not sure. She didn't get a chance to tell me.” In fact, the only thing Laine was certain of was the woman's warning that kept repeating through her head.

Hide them. Protect them.

“I don't know anything about these particular babies,” Laine said. The panic started to crawl through her again. “But I'm sure they'll be hungry soon. I figured since you have a nephew, you might be able to get some baby supplies.”

What Tucker did do was curse and reach for the phone again. Once again, she tried to stop him, but before he could make a call she didn't want him to make, the phone rang. The sound shot through the room and sent her heart slamming against her chest. It also caused the babies to stir.

“Colt,” Tucker said when he answered. Someone that she knew well. Colt was his kid brother and the deputy sheriff of Sweetwater Springs. He was also someone else she wasn't sure she could trust. “I was just about to call you.”

Tucker still had his gun gripped in his hand, and he turned his steely-gray lawman's eyes to the window when he put the call on speaker.

“I tried your cell phone first and when I didn't get an answer, I called the landline. Good thing you're there. Just had an interesting visit from two San Antonio cops looking for Laine Braddock,” Colt continued. “They said they had a warrant for her arrest.”

Oh, mercy. It was a lie, of course. There was no warrant out on her, but this had to be the two men who'd killed the woman.

“Are they still there?” Laine blurted out. “If so, arrest them.”

“Laine?” Colt mumbled. He said her name like profanity. “Tucker, what the hell's she doing at your place?”

“I'm trying to figure that out now. Why'd the men want to arrest her?”

“Aiding and abetting an escaped felon.” Colt paused. “Did she?”

“No!” Laine insisted.

At the same moment, Tucker said, “I'm trying to figure that out, too. Was there anything suspicious about these men?”

“Nothing that I noticed. Why?”

“Just check and make sure they're really cops. I have an old friend in SAPD, Lieutenant Nate Ryland. Call him and make sure these two guys are from his department. Another thing I need you to do is get someone out to Laine's office ASAP and check the back parking lot for any signs of an attack.”

“An attack? What the devil's going on?” Colt pressed.

“Just send someone over there and let me know if there's anything to find.”

“And don't use your police radio,” Laine insisted. “The men are probably monitoring the airwaves, and they might try to go back and clean up before you can investigate the scene.”

Colt, no doubt, wanted to ask plenty more questions, but Tucker cut him off. “I'll be in touch after I've made some more calls.” With that, Tucker hung up and headed out of the room and into the hall.

“What calls?” Laine asked, following him. She couldn't go far in case the babies started to cry, but thankfully the hall wasn't that long.

Tucker ducked into a room—his bedroom, she soon realized. He grabbed a black T-shirt that'd been draped over a chair. He slipped it on.

No more bare chest.

And she hated that she'd even noticed something like that at a time like this. Of course, it was hard not to notice a man who looked like Tucker McKinnon. That rumpled sandy-brown hair. Those eyes.

That amazing body.

Laine was counting heavily on him using that lawman's body if it came down to protecting the babies.

He looked up at her as he tugged on his boots, and his left eyebrow slid up. Only then did Laine realize that she was gawking at him.

“What calls?” she repeated. Obviously, the murder she'd witnessed had caused her brain to turn cloudy.

“Social services, for one. We have to turn these babies over to the proper authorities.”

“What if these killers have connections there, too?” She didn't wait for him to answer. “It's too risky to call anyone now. We need to find someone we can trust before we let anyone know we have the babies.”

Tucker gave her a flat look, as if she'd lost her mind. Heck, maybe she had.

“Look, you've been through a bad experience,” he said, his tone not exactly placating, but close enough. “And because someone else broke the law, that doesn't mean we have the right to do the same. The babies need to be turned over to social services so they can find out who they are. It's possible the woman who was hiding behind the car isn't even their mother.”

That hit her like an avalanche. Because it might be true. God, why hadn't she thought of that? Except she remembered the look of desperation on the woman's face. Her plea for help.

Hide them. Protect them.

And Laine had to shake her head. “She sacrificed her life for them. Only their mother would have done that. A kidnapper would have just handed them over to the killers to save herself.”

Tucker stared at her. And stared. Before he mumbled some profanity and snatched up his phone from the nightstand. “A friend of a friend is married to a social worker. I'll arrange a meeting with her.”

A meeting like that still wasn't without risks, but it was better than involving the cops. Of course, if Colt found blood or something else in the parking lot, Laine seriously doubted that he would keep the information to himself.

At some point, all of this had to become official.

Laine heard a soft, kittenlike sound and hurried back to the pantry. One of the babies was stirring. The other was still sound asleep. Laine went closer, knelt beside them and tried to gently rock the baby with her hand.

“My friend didn't answer,” Tucker said, coming back into the kitchen. “So I left a message.” He tipped his head to the babies. “Are they boys or girls?”

“I don't know.” She'd been so focused on getting them to safety that she hadn't considered anything else. But Laine considered it now.

Both babies wore full-length body gowns with drawstrings at the bottoms. She loosened the one on the squirming baby and peeked inside the diaper.

“This one's a boy,” she relayed to Tucker. She had a look at the other one. “And this one's a girl.”

The different sexes could mean they weren't twins after all, though they looked alike and appeared to be the same age. But what if the dead woman had rescued her own child and then someone else's? It could mean there was another woman being held captive.

Or another woman who was already dead.

That sickened Laine even more.

“If my friend doesn't call back in the next few minutes, we'll need to get someone else out here to take them,” Tucker explained. “I mean, we don't even have any way to feed them. My nephew's two, and he doesn't drink from a bottle. I doubt we'd even have anything like that around the ranch.”

Laine couldn't dispute what he was saying. Nor could she push aside the feeling that these babies felt like her responsibility now.

Tucker mumbled something she didn't catch and went to the kitchen window to look out again. When the baby kept squirming and started to fuss, Laine eased him into her arms.

She had little experience holding a baby, and even though she'd run through the pasture with them, the babies had been wrapped in that bulky blanket. With nothing but the gown and his diaper between them, the baby felt as fragile as paper-thin crystal.

Tucker glanced at her and frowned. “You know what you're doing?”

“No.” But the baby did seem to settle down when she rocked him, so Laine kept doing it. “I'm sorry for bringing them to your doorstep, but I drove out of town as fast as I could and didn't know where else to go.”

She glanced around the kitchen. “We used to play here when we were kids.”

“Yeah. It was my grandfather's house.”

The explanation was clipped, as if it were the last thing he wanted to discuss with her. Maybe because they'd done more than just play in this house. They'd shared a childhood kiss there. She had been ten. Tucker, eleven. Twenty-three years ago.

Just days before her father's murder.

After that, there'd been no kissing.

No more playing together. No more friendship.

Even though she'd just been a kid, it hadn't taken long before Laine had realized what gossip everyone was spreading—that Tucker's mother, Jewell, and her father, Whitt, had done something bad. Later, she would come to understand that
something bad
meant they'd been lovers. And that Jewell had murdered her father when he'd tried to break things off and work on saving his marriage. A murder that Jewell had yet to be punished for. At least now the woman was in jail, awaiting trial.

“Don't,” Tucker warned, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. “I don't want to take any trips down memory lane right now.”

Fair enough. His mother was a touchy subject for both of them. From everything Laine had heard, Tucker and his brothers weren't disputing Jewell's guilt. They only wanted the woman who'd cheated on their father and abandoned them to get out of their lives and leave Sweetwater Springs.

Tucker's cell phone rang, causing the baby to fuss again, and Laine leaned in so she could see the caller's name on the screen.

Colt.

The fear returned with a vengeance, and she prayed that Tucker's brother had found something—anything—that would help her keep the babies safe.

Laine leaned in so she'd be able to hear what he said. Obviously she leaned too close, because her arm brushed against Tucker's chest. He shot her a “back off” scowl and hit the speaker function so she'd be able to hear.

“Just got off the phone with Lieutenant Ryland,” Colt immediately said. “He doesn't know a thing about two SAPD cops coming to Sweetwater Springs.”

“So they're fake,” Laine concluded.

“Looks that way. And there's also no warrant for your arrest.”

She hadn't expected to feel as much relief as she did. Laine knew she'd done nothing to have an arrest warrant issued against her, and the last thing she needed right now was real cops trying to arrest her for a fake warrant.

“What about the parking lot?” Tucker asked. “You find anything?”

“I sent Reed to check it out. Still waiting to hear from him.”

He was talking about Reed Caldwell, one of the deputies. Laine hoped the two men who'd fired those shots had managed to leave some kind of evidence behind. And then she thought of something else.

“Maybe the dead woman's fingerprints are somewhere on my car? She had her hand on the door when I first spotted her.”

“Dead woman?” Colt questioned.

Tucker groaned and rubbed his hand over his face. “Laine thinks she witnessed a murder.”

“I don't
think
it. I
know
I did.”

“She witnessed a shooting,” Tucker said, “by two men dressed as cops. Her car's parked in the woods near my place. When Reed's done with the parking lot, can you send him out to check for prints?”

“Sure. But you know as well as I do, if there was really a murder, I need Laine down here now to make an official report.”

Tucker glanced at her and then at the baby she was holding. “There's a complication. The woman left two babies, and they're newborns by the looks of it. Any reports of missing babies?”

“None,” Colt said without hesitation. “If something like that had come in, I would have known.”

Yes, he probably would. Amber Alerts got top priority, even in a small-town sheriff's office.

“But I'll make some calls,” Colt continued. “Maybe this is a case of parental abduction and the local authorities haven't reported it yet.”

Tucker mumbled his thanks. “Hold on a second, Colt.” He motioned toward Laine's phone. “Give it to me.”

It took some doing, balancing the baby while working her way into her jeans pocket to retrieve the phone. She handed it to Tucker.

Normally, Laine wouldn't have been wearing jeans on a workday, but she hadn't had any appointments. She'd simply gone in to catch up on paperwork and rearrange some things in her office.

As bad as her situation was, she shuddered to think of how much worse it could have been if she hadn't been there to rescue the babies. Either the killers would have found them, or else it would have been heaven knows how long before someone spotted them in the parking lot.

Tucker scrolled through the list of calls she'd received and read Colt the number of the last one on the list. It was the one from the woman.

“It's possible that phone was stolen from those two fake cops,” Tucker explained to his brother. “It's also possible that it's a prepaid cell.”