The Next Mrs. Blackthorne (Bitter Creek Book 6) (26 page)

Kate struggled harder, but that only tightened her bonds. She sent a silent plea to Jack McKinley.
I’m at the courthouse. I’m in trouble. Come find me. Please.
She wondered how long it would be before her mother and father realized she’d been kidnapped. She wondered how their weekend had turned out. Had they managed to settle their differences? She hoped so. She so much wanted them to be happy. Even if she wasn’t going to be there to see it.

Thinking of her mother reminded her of that odd sensation she’d had as she’d been blacking out. Had she really heard her mother’s voice? Or was that her imagination? Did that mean Donnie had taken her mother prisoner, as well?

“Donnie better not hurt her,” Kate growled beneath the gag. “If he does, he’ll have to deal with Daddy. And North. And King.” She thought of all her family’s powerful resources focused on Donnie Brown. Once that happened, the kid was toast.

Which would be great, assuming she wasn’t fried first.

“You shouldn’t have interfered,” Donnie said angrily. “Then this wouldn’t have happened. Now you’ve ruined everything.”

Libby felt faint with pain and loss of blood. She pressed her hand against the gunshot wound in her side, feeling the blood oozing between her fingers. “I need a doctor,” she said.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Donnie said. “I had everything planned. But this might work out just as well. When the judge gets a call that you’re in the hospital, he’ll call a recess and leave the courthouse. Once that happens, I can call in the bomb threat.”

Libby felt her heart skip a beat. A bomb at the courthouse? Where Clay was sure to be? And where Donnie might have taken Kate? She glanced sideways at the young man who’d acted so friendly in the courtroom, wondering how he planned to silence her, now that she knew about the bomb he’d planted at the courthouse. Another bullet, this time somewhere more damaging?

“Where’s my daughter now?” she demanded. “What have you done with her? Is Kate anywhere near the courthouse?”

“She’s perfectly safe. For the moment.”

Donnie’s threat against Kate had kept Libby docile as they’d exited the Four Seasons. She’d sat quietly in the car, while he’d driven to an isolated location with hundreds of storage units. But when Donnie had opened the door to one of them, and she’d seen Kate huddled on the floor, she’d gone berserk.

Libby had only gotten a glimpse of Kate, erupting from the floor and running at Donnie with her fists raised, before she’d charged Donnie herself. Libby had grabbed at Donnie’s gun, and it had gone off. The shock and pain of being shot had caused her to lose consciousness. She’d been awake and aware just long enough to hear Kate cry, “Mom!”

When Libby had regained consciousness, she’d found herself belted into the passenger seat of Clay’s SUV, with Donnie at the wheel. Kate had been nowhere to be seen. Libby’s heart clenched as she realized that while she’d been away with Clay, her daughter had apparently been a prisoner of this youthful psychopath.

She glanced at Donnie, whose brow and upper lip were dotted with perspiration, despite the fact the air conditioner in the car was running full blast. His hazel eyes looked haunted. His sandy hair stood up in spikes where he’d run his sweaty hands through it. The young man was clearly under a great deal of stress.

“You don’t have to do whatever it is you’re planning to do,” Libby said.

“I have to get my father free. Otherwise, the government is going to execute him.”

“Killing more people is only going to make the government more determined to hunt you and your father down,” Libby said. “You’ll never have peace. You’ll never be free.”

It was plain her words were having an effect, but not the one she wanted. Donnie only seemed more agitated.

“Just shut up,” Donnie said. “Or I’ll shut you up.”

Libby saw they were approaching Brackenridge Hospital, which was not more than a mile from the courthouse. She glanced sideways at Donnie, wondering how he planned to keep her from telling what she knew of his plans. She was terrified that he would shoot her again—and this time kill her. She reached down and surreptitiously released the seat belt, thinking she could leap from the car. Suddenly, an annoying chime resounded throughout the car.

“Buckle up,” Donnie said, swinging the gun in her direction. “You never know when I might have to stop fast.”

Libby rebuckled her seat belt, feeling her heart sink as Donnie stopped at the beginning of a driveway that led to the Brackenridge Hospital emergency entrance. “You don’t have to shoot me,” she said. “I promise I won’t say anything.”

“I know you won’t,” Donnie said.

“Please,” Libby said. She was ashamed to feel so scared, to be pleading with a kid who obviously had no conscience. But she didn’t want to die. Not like this. Not with so much of her life unlived. She was surprised how clear her choices became at a moment like this. She wanted a chance to love and be loved by Clay. She wanted marriage and children. She wanted a future with Clay that would include everything they’d dreamed of in the past—and more.

Of course, she was lying to Donnie. She had no intention of keeping his plans to herself. If she had the chance, she would yell them to the high heavens. Libby understood why Donnie wanted to silence her. She just wasn’t ready to be silenced in the only way she could imagine him doing it.

“Please, I—”

“This’ll only put you out for a little while,” he said, putting the SUV in park, so he had both hands free. He set the gun in his lap and took a capped syringe out of his breast pocket. “But it should be long enough for us to be long gone.”

Libby wondered why Donnie wasn’t worried about leaving a witness behind who could testify against him. Against
them
she suddenly realized. Donnie had said, “Long enough for
us
to be long gone.”

She stared at the syringe Donnie had in his hand, watching as he removed the cap to reveal a wicked looking needle. Maybe whatever drug it contained was intended to kill her, and he just wanted to keep her calm until he could inject it.

But if he’d wanted her dead, he could have killed her and left her in the storage room where he’d been keeping Kate. He’d mentioned he needed her as a lure to get Clay away from the courtroom. Maybe that meant Clay would be safe from whatever devastation Donnie was planning at the federal courthouse. Libby stared at the needle Donnie held upright.

If she fought him, he might shoot her again. The gun was sitting right there in his lap. The needle seemed the lesser of two evils. She held tight to the wound in her side as she felt the prick of a needle in her arm.

“You have about thirty seconds,” he said. “Take your purse when you get out. I want them to know who you are.”

“Clay and I aren’t related. He won’t be the one the hospital notifies,” Libby said.

“I’ve left a note for the judge at the courthouse,” Donnie said. “He’ll come.”

Donnie drove up to the emergency room door and said, “Get out.”

Libby fumbled with the seat belt with fingers that didn’t seem to be working. Donnie leaned across her and unbuckled the belt, then opened the door and repeated, “Get out. Now.”

Libby stepped down from the SUV and felt her knees buckle under her. The last thing she saw as she crumpled to the pavement was Donnie Brown driving away in Clay’s SUV.

“How the hell did this happen?” North demanded, as he stood in the hallway outside his sister’s hospital room, his hands fisted on his hips. “For a Texas Ranger working this case undercover, you don’t seem to know a helluva lot.”

Jack McKinley shoved a frustrated hand through his hair. “Donnie gave me the slip. I thought he was down for the night, but he snuck out of his house before dawn. I had no idea he even knew where to find your sister, much less had the balls to kidnap her. The gunshot wound isn’t serious,” Jack continued. “The bullet hit Libby in the side, missed all the vital stuff, and went right through.”

“That’s comforting,” North said sarcastically.

“The doctor stitched her up, and she’ll be fine,” Jack said, uncowed. “Donnie apparently gave her chloral hydrate to put her out. When the drug wears off, we’ll be able to talk to her.”

“Where is Kate?” North asked.

“I don’t know. The last time I saw her was Thursday afternoon, when I told her I couldn’t go with her to Bitter Creek.”

“She told Clay she was spending the weekend with you.”

Jack flushed. “She lied.”

“You promised me you’d look out for her.”

“I thought the best way to protect her was to keep an eye on Donnie.”

“You were wrong.”

“I underestimated the kid,” Jack said. “He’s smarter than he looks. I searched for Kate as soon as I realized I’d lost track of Donnie, but I couldn’t find her. Now Donnie’s disappeared.”

“Do we know for sure that he has Kate?” North asked. “That she isn’t with a girlfriend somewhere?”

“None of Kate’s friends have seen her since she was late to class on Thursday,” Jack said.

“Damn,” North muttered. “I was afraid something like this might happen. Who have you got looking for her?”

“Every law enforcement agency in the state has been alerted. We’ve also got the FBI involved, because it appears Donnie’s kidnapped her.”

North didn’t like the worry he saw in Jack’s dark eyes. Jack was good at what he did, and if Bomber Brown’s kid had managed to slip away, he was damned clever. Which didn’t bode well for Kate. “Find her, Jack.”

“I will,” Jack said.

North knew Jack would find Kate. The only question was whether he would find her in time—and alive. North stood where he was until Jack disappeared onto the elevator. He glanced back into the room where his sister lay on sterile white sheets and felt his insides clench at the thought of how close he’d come to losing her.

He and Libby were closer than anyone suspected. Their whole lives it had been the two of them against the world. Libby had done most of the caretaking for their siblings, while North had stood between Libby and the younger kids and his father’s drunken rages. He’d taken more than one blow to deflect King’s anger from the others.

North rubbed at the scar on his shoulder. He and Libby would have left home a lot sooner if they hadn’t been worried about what would happen to Taylor and Gray and Tory.

He hadn’t been surprised when Libby got pregnant. That was one way young girls managed to force the issue and get out. He’d felt sorry for Libby when King punished her for falling in love with a Blackthorne by threatening to ruin Clay if she didn’t stay at Kingdom Come.

He’d seen how unhappy Libby was for the two years before she turned eighteen. And how she was never again quite as happy as she’d been during the summer she’d spent with Clay.

“You and me against the world,” he murmured, as he leaned against the portal and listened to the steady beep of Libby’s life signs on the monitors. He knew he didn’t have the patience to sit beside her bed and wait for her to wake. Besides, he’d left Jocelyn in a family waiting room downstairs. He would have the hospital page him the moment Libby woke up.

North was halfway down the hall when he ran into Jocelyn. “I asked you to wait for me downstairs.”

“How is Libby?”

“It looks like she’ll be okay. It’s just a flesh wound.”

“I wanted to leave these flowers for her.” Jocelyn held out a bouquet of white daisies in a tall glass vase decorated with a bright yellow bow, which she’d apparently picked up in the gift shop downstairs.

“She’ll appreciate that,” North said. He stepped back and let Jocelyn pass, then followed her back down the hall to Libby’s room.

He hadn’t invited Jocelyn to come. But somehow she was here. The woman had insinuated herself into his life so deeply he wasn’t sure what he was going to do when September came, and she wanted out.

There was no chance she was going to stay, because she’d made it clear she wanted more than a marriage of convenience. He’d argued that respect and liking were far more lasting than love. She’d replied that respect and liking were absolutely necessary. But so was love.

Love meant being able to forgive, she’d said. Love meant putting the other person first. Love meant tolerance and caring and adoring and—She’d come up with a laundry list of all the things love was.

He’d considered explaining to her why he would never let himself fall in love. How losing the only women he claimed he could ever love had made his father a bitter, angry, unhappy man. How North had vowed he would never let a woman get close enough to hurt him like that. But it would have felt like scraping off a layer of skin, leaving blood and bone exposed, to reveal so much. So he never had.

He’d tried to show her he cared without using the word
love.
He’d spent every night in her bed, so she’d know he wasn’t with another woman. He’d brought Breed into the house for meals and spent time with the boy during the day. He’d eaten every bite of the food she prepared for him and asked for seconds. And he’d kept his mouth shut when she changed his home out of all recognition, adding feminine peach and aqua pillows and curtains to his spartan earth tones.

The woman was crazy about flowers. She’d planted black-eyed susans and morning glories and zinnias and marigolds around his back porch. Which would remind him even when she was gone—after he’d removed the feminine pillows and curtains—that she’d been there.

“This is a nice room,” Jocelyn said, as she set the daisies on a table beside Libby’s bed.

“If you say so,” North replied. He’d hated hospitals ever since the fourth time his mother had taken pills to end her life—and succeeded. He didn’t like the antiseptic smell. He didn’t like the shiny floors or the inevitable monochromatic walls. He didn’t like the mechanical sound of the monitors hooked up to sick and dying bodies. Most of all, he didn’t like the efficient and distant doctors and nurses, who’d seen death often enough to be able to mouth platitudes to families without weeping themselves.

North watched as Jocelyn plumped up Libby’s pillow and brushed her blond hair away from her brow, as though the two of them were friends, which he knew to be far from the truth.

But that was Jocelyn. Giving. Caring. He didn’t allow himself to think what he’d be feeling right now if she was the one lying in that bed. His heart squeezed until it hurt, and he took a deep breath and let it out.

She came to him, recognizing his distress, and put her arms around him to comfort him. He gripped her hard enough to make her squeak and heard her gentle laugh as he loosened his hold.

She leaned back to look up into his eyes and put her hand against his cheek, because she liked the dark, bristly beard that grew overnight. “Libby’s fine, North. She’s going to be fine.”

He squeezed her again, because she didn’t understand it was the fear of losing her that had frightened him. Then he let her go and took a step back. Aware that he had to cure himself of needing her so much. Aware that he was very close to the fine line where he could no longer lie to himself. When he would finally have to admit that he loved her.

“Shouldn’t she be waking up soon?” Jocelyn asked, crossing back to Libby’s bedside.

“I don’t know,” North replied, purposely staying where he was.

“I guess she was lucky,” Jocelyn said.

North lifted a brow. “Lucky?”

“That he didn’t kill her.” Jocelyn frowned, then looked at North. “Which makes me wonder why he didn’t kill her. I mean, that would have made more sense than leaving her alive, where she could be a witness against him. Why do you suppose he wanted her alive?”

“I never looked at it that way,” North admitted. “You’re right, though. If Brown had wanted her dead, he would have killed her. Which means Libby serves some purpose by being alive.”

North tried to imagine what sort of plan Bomber Brown’s son might have hatched that would work better with Libby alive.

While he was thinking, a harried-looking Clay showed up in the doorway. He shot an anxious look at North and asked, “Is she all right?”

Clay didn’t stop, just crossed all the way to Libby’s side and took her hand in his. “She feels cold.”

“I think that’s the air-conditioning in here,” Jocelyn said in a soothing voice. “North says she just has a flesh wound. That she’ll be fine.”

North realized Jocelyn had stepped in as a mediator to make it possible for the two men to communicate without actually having to speak to each other. Which was ridiculous, under the circumstances. If things worked out as North thought they would, Clay Blackthorne was going to become his brother-in-law. Libby would be sure to invite North to family events. And he would attend. Because however much he hated Blackthornes, he loved his sister more.

For Libby’s sake, he extended an olive branch. “Jocelyn pointed out something to me. Maybe you’d have a better insight into the situation than I do, since you’re more familiar with Brown and his son.”

“What is it?” Clay asked.

“Why would Donnie Brown take special pains to keep Libby alive?” North said. “He could have killed her and dumped her somewhere, but instead, he dropped her off at a hospital.”

Clay looked aside for a moment. It took North a moment to realize that Clay wasn’t ignoring him, he was thinking. Then Clay’s chin jerked up, and he focused his gray eyes on North. “I got a note delivered to me in the courtroom, telling me that Libby had been shot, and that she was here at Brackenridge. I didn’t question who sent it. Did you?”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t,” North said. “I would have called, but I knew you were in court, and Libby’s condition is stable. But it’s obvious someone wanted you out of the courtroom. Why?”

“I can make a guess,” Clay said, meeting North’s gaze. “Since I only called a short recess, Brown wouldn’t be taken back to the jail. He’d be kept at the courthouse.”

“But Brown’s son knew you’d be gone long enough for him to arrange a rescue, some sort of incident to distract everybody and give him the chance to free his father,” North said.

“It isn’t going to be easy getting Brown out of the courthouse,” Clay said. “There’s a lot of security around him, a bunch of deputies keeping an eye—”

“What if Donnie had a hostage?” North said. “And he was willing to trade his hostage for his father?”

“What hostage?” Clay asked.

“Kate.”

North heard Clay take a quick, harsh breath. “He’s got Kate? Why wasn’t I told?”

“There hasn’t been time. Jack just figured all this out in the past half hour. We didn’t realize the truth until this morning. Jack didn’t check on Kate until after Donnie had escaped his surveillance.”

“Kate told me she was staying in Austin to study, but I figured she’d be with Jack. What happened?”

North sighed. “I should have told you this sooner, I suppose.”

“Told me what?” Clay asked sharply when North hesitated.

“Jack and Kate aren’t really engaged. They aren’t even dating. It was all part of a ploy by Kate to get you and Libby together.”

“I don’t know whether to be relieved or infuriated,” Clay said, shaking his head in disbelief. “How did Kate talk someone like Jack McKinley into such a harebrained scheme?”

“I’m to blame for that,” North said. “I asked Jack to keep an eye on Kate.”

“That sounds like asking the fox to guard the hen-house,” Clay said with asperity.

“Jack’s a Texas Ranger.”

Clay looked stunned. “I’ve talked to Owen nearly every day at the couthouse, and he never said a word to me about Jack being a Texas Ranger.”

“Jack works undercover. Owen might not have known. Or he might have had orders to keep his mouth shut,” North said.

Clay’s eyes narrowed. “Does Jack have anything to do with Kate going missing?”

“Jack specifically told Kate to stay away from Donnie Brown,” North said. “Advice she apparently ignored.”

“If I know Kate, and I do, she did the opposite of what Jack told her to do,” Clay said.

“It sure as hell looks that way,” North agreed.

“I guess we have the answer to why Libby was kept alive,” Jocelyn said.

Both men looked at her in surprise.

She looked at Clay and said, “To get you to recess court, so his father would be at the courthouse, but out of the courtroom.”

“We need to call security at the courthouse,” Clay said. “We need to warn them—”

“I have a feeling it’s already too late for that,” North said.

“Clay?” a weak voice said.

“You’re awake!” Clay said, turning back to Libby. He crossed and sat beside her on the bed, but apparently that wasn’t close enough, because he leaned down and tenderly kissed her on the forehead. “I’m glad to see you’re awake. How do you feel?”