How to Score (25 page)

But Chase didn’t have time to answer, because at that moment, the man clamped a hand over the girl’s mouth, snatched her up, and pushed out the emergency exit.

Adrenaline dumped into Chase’s veins. He ran across the room, weaving around a waitress carrying a tray of drinks. She jumped back and spilled them onto a heavyset man standing by a video machine.

“Hey!” he shouted.

Chase charged past and pushed out the emergency door, into the night air.

The man was already in the parking lot, shoving the wailing child into the driver’s side of a black Silverado. Dammit, Chase didn’t have his gun. “Freeze!” he shouted anyway, hoping to buy some time. Sure enough, the man hesitated and looked up, then pushed the child onto the floor of the passenger seat.

Chase had to get there,
now.
If the man slammed and locked the door, it would be too late.

The man straightened in the driver’s seat. Chase’s lungs burned as he raced to close the distance. He was almost there—almost.

He watched the man’s wiry arm reach for the truck door. His heart crashing in his chest, Chase lunged forward and hurled himself into the truck, landing on top of the man.

The man struggled, trying to force Chase out of the vehicle, but Chase grabbed him around the neck, hauled him out of the truck, and slammed him onto the pavement.

The man grunted as Chase rolled him over, held him down by the back of the neck, and sat on his back.

“Dear God in heaven!” Chase heard a woman gasp.

Chase grabbed the man’s hands and held them behind his back, then looked up to see a grandmotherly woman in a floral dress holding a bouquet of birthday balloons.

“What’s going on?” asked an elderly gentleman beside her.

“FBI,” Chase said. “You got a phone?”

The elderly man nodded, bobbing the white tufts of hair around the bald circle on his head.

“Then do me a favor and call 911.” Holding the perpetrator’s wrists with one hand, Chase reached in his back pocket and extracted his handcuffs, then expertly snapped them onto the man’s wrists.

A childlike scream shrieked from the pickup. Chase looked at the elderly woman, who was clutching her purse in front of her like a shield. “Ma’am, would you mind seeing to the little girl in the truck?” he asked. “This man was trying to abduct her.”

“Oh, my heavens!” the woman breathed.

“You got it all wrong,” protested the man on the pavement. “I’m her father.”

“No! He’s not my daddy!” the little girl sobbed.

The woman scurried to the passenger side of the truck, opened the door, and pulled out the weeping child.

Chase searched the man’s pants pockets. In the left front one, he found a handgun. In the right, he found a hunting knife. Sticking the weapons under his belt, he found the man’s wallet in his back pocket. He yanked it out, just as a stream of people poured out of the restaurant’s emergency exit.

“Hannah?” called a frantic blond woman. “Hannah?”

“Mommy!” The little girl broke away from the elderly woman’s embrace and ran toward the blonde.

“What happened?” the woman cried, kneeling down to cradle the child.

“This man tried to abduct your daughter,” Chase said.

“Oh, my God!” The woman picked up the girl and hugged her to her chest.

Chase spotted Sammi in the crowd, her arm around Max. He motioned to her with a jerk of his head. She said something to the mother of Max’s friend, and the woman put her hand on Max’s shoulder. Sammi stepped through the crowd toward him.

“Do me a favor and read his ID to me,” Chase called, tossing her the man’s wallet.

Sammi caught it, then stepped into the light of the streetlamp and opened it. “It says he’s James Dale Raymond.”

A pedophile wanted by the FBI for kidnapping, rape, and child pornography. “You sorry sonuvabitch,” Chase muttered. He tightened his grip on the man and struggled to get a grip on his emotions, as well. As far as he was concerned, no lowlife was lower than a child sex offender.

“The police are on the way,” the elderly man said, closing his cell phone.

“That’s lucky for you,” Chase muttered to the man. Lucky for him, as well; he was fighting the urge to slam his fist through the fugitive’s face, and that was just for warmup.

Sammi took Max back inside the restaurant while Chase dealt with the police. She challenged him to a game of arcade basketball and tried to act calm, but her insides were twisted into knots.

She’d known Chase was a law-enforcement officer, but she’d begun to mentally gloss over the fact. After all, he didn’t wear a uniform, and she’d never seen him with a gun.

Until today. Watching him pull a gun out of that man’s pocket had yanked a primitive chain in her brain, leaving her completely unnerved.

“Your turn.” Max handed her the tennis-ball-sized basketball. She tossed it toward the basket and watched it bounce off the rim.

“Looks like you need to work on your free shot, Sammi.”

She turned to see Chase strolling up as if nothing had happened. He winked at Max.

“I beat her three times in a row,” the boy gleefully exclaimed.

“Wow.” Chase grinned and ruffled his hair. “You’re almost ready for the pros.”

“Nah. I gotta get real tall first.”

Chase looked at Sammi and laughed.

Max looked up earnestly. “Is the bad guy going to jail?”

“Yep. For a long, long time.”

“What did he do, anyway?”

“He broke some laws.”

“Like stealing?”

“Yeah.”

“He had a gun, didn’t he?”

“Yep.”

“My daddy has a gun,” Max said solemnly.

“I know. That’s because your dad is an FBI agent.”

“Like you.”

“That’s right.”

Max cocked his head to the side. “Are you ever scared of gettin’ shot?”

Chase cast Sammi a sideways look, and she had the eerie sensation that he could read her mind. “Sometimes. But I’ve had a lot of training, and so has your dad. We’ve learned how to take guns away from bad people so that nobody gets hurt.”

Max nodded. “I’m gonna learn how to do that when I grow up.”

“I thought you were going to be a basketball player.”

“I’m gonna be both. An’ I’m going to be a fireman, too.”

Chase looked at Sammi and grinned. “Well, in that case, you’re going to need a lot of energy. What do you say we order that pizza?”

“Yeah!”

Sammi didn’t have much of an appetite, but Max and Chase ate like hungry savages. While Max played one last game, Chase filled her in on the details of exactly what happened. Later they stopped at Baskin-Robbins for ice cream, then drove back to the boy’s home.

Sammi drew a bath, and Max gleefully climbed into the tub, wearing his new plastic fireman’s hat. He took it off long enough to allow Sammi to shampoo his hair, then promptly plopped it on again and played rowdily with his fire engine until the water grew cold.

He dried off, pulled on a pair of fire-truck-printed PJs, then snuggled, all pink and soap-scented, between them on the sofa. Chase read him the same story three times. The party then moved into his race-car-themed bedroom, where Chase and Sammi knelt on either side of him at his bedside as he bowed his white-blond head and said his prayers. Sammi tucked him in, and when Chase smiled at her as the boy’s chubby arms stretched around her neck to give her a baby-shampoo-scented hug, a lump formed in her throat. It grew into a solid mass as she watched Chase bend down and drop a kiss on the top of the child’s head.

Oh, dear Lord, she realized with alarm. She was falling for Chase.

She wrapped her arms around herself protectively and headed for the hallway.

Chase closed the door to Max’s bedroom, then followed Sammi to the living room. “He’s a great kid, isn’t he?” Chase said.

“Yeah.”
And you’re a great guy.
She watched him settle on the sofa beside her and struggled to act normal, as if she hadn’t just realized that her heart was in free fall. “You were amazing with that kidnapper.”

He lifted his shoulders. “Just doing my job.”

“What made you notice the man?”

“He looked like he was about to pull something.”

“How did you pick up on that all the way across a room?”

He lifted his shoulders. “When you grow up like I did, you get pretty good at picking up signals.”

She looked at Chase’s tightly clenched jaw and picked up a few signals of her own. “Your dad was really rough on you, wasn’t he?” she asked gently.

He shrugged again. “Let’s just say he was a good role model of what not to be.”

Which made Chase all the more amazing. Her heart tumbled harder. How could she not fall for this man?

A key rattled in the front door, and then it swung open. Melanie stepped into the room, her purse and a pink party-favor bag in her hand. “Hello!” she said merrily. “How was your evening?”

“Completely uneventful,” Chase said with a sly grin at Sammi.

“If that was uneventful, I don’t want to see your idea of exciting,” Sammi retorted.

Melanie looked from one to the other. “What happened?”

“Well… ” Chase rubbed his chin.

Melanie’s brow creased in concern.

“Don’t worry—Max is just fine,” Sammi said quickly. “But there was a little incident at the Pizza Palace.”

After filling Melanie in on the evening’s events, Chase and Sammi said their good-byes. The last of the summer’s cicadas croaked in the trees as they walked to his car.

“Thanks for joining Max and me tonight,” Chase said as he clicked on his seat belt.

“It was a blast. Except for that little attempted-kidnapping incident.” She looked at him as he started the engine. “I’ve gotta say, you sure know how to show a girl a thrilling time.”

He shot her a crooked grin. “It was all a setup to impress you.”

“Well, it worked.” She gazed at his profile in the dark as he backed his Explorer out of the driveway. “If it weren’t for you, who knows what would be happening to that little girl right now?”

His jaw tightened. “I’m afraid I know all too well.”

And it bothered the hell out of him; she could tell. Sympathy swelled in her chest. “It’s got to be hard, seeing some of the things you see.”

“Yeah. Especially if a kid’s involved.”

She thought of the way her dad used to come home moody and distant, unable to shake the things he’d seen that day. “How do you cope with it?”

He steered the car down the street. “By knowing I’m trying to do something about it.”

“Are you ever afraid of getting shot?”

“Nah. I never think about it.”

Sammi sighed. “I don’t guess officers ever do.”

He looked over at her, his brown eyes warm. “It must have been hard on your family when your dad was injured.”

That was putting it mildly. The day her father had come home from the hospital was burned into her memory like a brand.

He’d insisted on wheeling himself up the new ramp to the front door, even though it was a steep incline and he was still weak from surgery. His face had been as bloodless and pale as an onion, his mouth twisted into a grimace. When he’d run out of steam halfway up, their mother had rushed to help. Sammi and Chloe had done the same, dropping the “welcome home” banner they’d been holding at the door. Her father had practically bared his teeth at them. “Let me do it myself!” he barked.

He’d struggled for an excruciating twenty more minutes, backing up, going forward, getting stuck. It became the pattern of their lives. He needed help; he didn’t want it; he was forced to accept it; he resented the people who provided it.

Chase braked at a stoplight. “After what happened to your dad, I’m surprised you’d want to date a law-enforcement officer.”

“I don’t.” Sammi grinned at him. “But I can’t seem to help myself.”

Her hazel eyes held Chase in a headlock. He couldn’t look away, even though he knew he needed to. The air grew steamy enough to fog up the windshield, and sexual tension stretched between them like a rubber band.

Hell. This was supposed to be dating light. He jerked his gaze to the window, looked out, and grabbed the first diversion he saw. “Hey, what’s going on at the Java Hut?”

Sammi glanced at the riverfront coffee shop, where a group of people were seated on a brightly lit patio, watching a woman at the microphone. “It’s poetry and music night,” she said. “Customers can get up and perform.”