Bullseye. Jessica Andersen
couldn’t even explain it to herself—she said, “Right after he relieved me of my duties, Secretary Cooper made arrangements to return to Washington. The cleaning crew won’t be in until tomorrow, so everything should be undisturbed. But I didn’t find anything in the quick run-through I was able to make before Cooper kicked me out, and I’ll bet he picked the place up so there wouldn’t be any suspicion. He’s committed to doing everything the kidnappers have demanded, particularly keeping the authorities out of this.”
It tugged at her that a man of Cooper’s stature and conviction could be so badly compromised by a threat to his family. A threat that never should have come to pass.
“Let’s get on with it.” A dark-haired, heavily muscled hunter named Tony hefted a case that looked like a souped-up crime scene field kit. “We need to be in and out before dawn.”
Isabella nodded shortly. “Come on.” She unlocked the front door with her key and pushed into the chalet before the hesitation could form. She didn’t want to look at the bullet-stung sofa and imagine Hope and the girls, didn’t want to look at the dining room table, hastily righted and reorganized, and remember seeing Louis Cooper bound to a chair, unmoving. But it was those images that, hopefully, would provide a clue.
Mike and Tony moved into the chalet for a preliminary sweep. They didn’t touch anything right away, instead getting an overall feeling of the scene of the crime, which should have had technicians swarming over it with state-of-the-art equipment instead of one lame duck agent and three bounty hunters.
Isabella felt an uncharacteristic, unwelcome press of tears at how quickly this had gone down, how completely her work—and Louis Cooper’s life—had been derailed. She swallowed hard and flinched when Jacob touched her arm.
She glanced at him and saw that his eyes asked, Are you okay? But out loud, he said, “How did they get in? Break a window in the back?”
“No.” The bitter failure of it burned her throat. “I looked. They didn’t break a damned thing. One minute everything was fine and the next they were inside my perimeter setting off a flash-bang in the living room. How?” She spread her hands to indicate confusion. Anger churned in her gut. “Damned if I know. I had the locks changed last week, and motions set around the far perimeter. They shouldn’t have been able to get through.”
He stared past her as the two other bounty hunters moved from room to room, turning on the lights as they went. The illumination lent a strangely cheerful glow to the empty space. “Maybe they got the new keys from someone on the inside,” Jacob said.
“Probably. Damn it.” Isabella forced herself to move into the dining room and look around, though she’d done so not seven hours earlier while Secretary Cooper had made his travel arrangements with shaking hands, then made a second call that effectively cut her off at the knees by subtly claiming she’d been acting irrational.
Irrational, my ass.
She felt the old, familiar anger and gritted her teeth. “Fine. Let’s do this.”
They searched the chalet from top to bottom, but Cooper had been thorough. He’d removed the tape from the old-fashioned answering machine, wiped the flash-bang soot off the walls and even flipped the torn leather cushion, which set off soft warning bells in the back of her mind.
It seemed like awfully clear thinking for a man whose family had been kidnapped.
But what was the alternative? That the kidnappers had come back afterward to clean the chalet? Unlikely.
So, senses heightened, she moved from room to room, searching again and watching the men of Big Sky perform a thorough forensic scan. Cameron Murphy’s bounty hunters had the reputation of being the best at what they did—and their skills were many and varied.
Not that she’d checked them out, or anything.
Then again, who was she kidding? She was preternaturally aware of Jacob’s every move, his quiet words to the others.
And that just ticked her off more. No doubt he hadn’t spared her another thought after they split. He certainly hadn’t tried to get in touch over the years.
Cursing inwardly, she redirected her thoughts, tossed the bedroom as thoroughly as she could, and sucked in a breath when she unearthed a squeaky duck from behind the bureau. It was purple, which meant it was Tiffany’s. The twins were nearly identical in looks and attitude, but Tiff loved purple and Becky preferred yellow.
God, she thought, please let them be okay.
She wanted to throw the cheerful little duck against the wall and howl at the injustice. She wanted to cuddle it close and pray for the babies and their mother.
Instead she set the toy on the bed and kept searching.
“I’VE GOT NOTHING.” Jacob glanced over his shoulder at Mike, who was meticulously dusting the door handle that lead out to the back porch. “You?”
“Wiped clean.” The normally garrulous Clark straightened from his task with an it’s-late-and-I’m-tired groan. “This is a bust. Let’s get your woman and get out of here.”
“She’s not my woman,” Jacob snapped with a quick, vicious bite of temper toward a man he considered a friend—if a slightly creepy one.
“If you say so.” Mike shrugged, but his eyes were sharp on Jacob’s face. On his stance.
“And don’t try to read me, either,” Jacob growled. “I’m not a suspect.”
“I don’t try to read anyone, I read them. And do you want to know what I see right now? I see—”
“No!” Jacob leaned down and got in the other man’s face. “I absolutely don’t want to know. I don’t believe in that hocus-pocus cr—”
“Jacob?” Isabella said from behind him. “Am I interrupting?”
He spun toward the arched doorway and the anger morphed again, this time into something hot and greedy. Something he hadn’t felt in a long, long time and didn’t welcome. “Yes, damn it, you’re—” Interrupting, he started to say but made himself bite the words off.
It wasn’t her fault he couldn’t deal with seeing her again. But just as seeing her on the television screen had immediately jarred him out of whack, having her an arm’s length away was…too tempting.
He was trying to handle it. Damn it, he was handling it. But he wasn’t handling the quick return of his oldest enemy—anger. He hated that she’d brought back that same sense of being trapped, of being out of control.
God, he hated this. And it wasn’t even her fault. Hell, from the looks of her, cool as a Montana stream, she wasn’t feeling a tenth of what he was. Which made it his problem, not hers.
So he took a breath and leveled his tone. “No, you’re not interrupting. We’re finished in here. We’ve got nothing. You?”
She shook her head and her auburn hair followed the motion in a slide of color and softness. “I didn’t find anything, but Tony wants you two at the back door.”
“Let’s go.” Glad to have something to do, Jacob gestured for her to go first, a bit of manners ingrained by his mother—or rather by the fleet of nannies, dance instructors and protocol experts she’d hired to shape her son into a civilized man like his father.
It had all been another level of control, one he’d gloried at escaping in college and broken free of just after, though he’d left a part of himself behind.
And wasn’t sure how to get it back. Wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Yet at the same time, the mossy-eyed woman with the rich auburn hair pulled at him, made him want to be a different man than the one he’d made himself. Because he didn’t know how to deal with that, or with her, he ignored Isabella to crouch beside Tony in the foyer just inside the back door. “What have you got?”
The lean, black-haired bounty hunter