Code Name: Daddy by Marilyn Tracy

Author:Marilyn Tracy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Suspense
Publisher: Harlequin Treasury
Published: 2011-06-10T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Saturday, November 10, 10:30 a.m. EST

“Give her up, Alec.”

“Never.”

“I’d rather not have to kill you....”

“To get to Cait, you’re going to have to.”

Jack raised the 9 mm assault rifle in his hands and trained it on his former partner. “Why don’t you let it go, Alec? You’re only creating problems by protecting her.”

“Why did you lie to me, Jack?”

“Get out of the way, Alec.”

Something brushed his face; he didn’t dare look away from Jack to see what it might be.

“Did you know about the baby?” Alec asked, his eyes on the gun.

Jack started to laugh, and raised the rifle another notch. Alec could see straight down the barrel.

“I warned you, Alec. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Alec swung his arm at the same moment Jack depressed the trigger.

In the split second before he struck, Alec analyzed the touch on his face. He froze in the very act of slamming his fist against Jack’s gun, understanding in that nanosecond that he was asleep, dreaming, that there was no gun, no Jack. His eyes flew open to see a wide-eyed, curly-haired infant whose head barely topped the side of the bed.

Allie gazed at his upraised, deadly hand. “Big,” she said, her mouth slack with awe.

“Oh, God,” he muttered over the huge lump in his throat. He forced his hand to his suddenly cold body. “You’ll never know, sweetheart.”

Allie said something that sounded like “mameep” and gave him a clue to her meaning by pointing beyond him.

Alec rolled over to see Cait curled on the other bed, facing away from him and obviously deeply asleep. Mameep ... Mama is asleep. Baby talk, he realized, wasn’t simply mispronounced English. Allie seemed to employ an entirely new variation of the language altogether.

“How did you get out of your bed?” he asked.

“Aleet.”

Alec struggled for translation. “What?”

Allie apparently decided he was deaf and repeated the word at a slightly higher volume, then echoed it even louder.

At the third shouting of the incomprehensible word, Alec sat up, disoriented, dry mouthed, thoroughly rattled by the need to provide his overtly distressed daughter with whatever aleet might be.

“I don’t understand,” he said honestly, earnestly. And abashedly. This was his own daughter, for heaven’s sake; surely it didn’t take an advanced degree in linguistics to communicate with a fourteen-month-old baby. People, even a few remarkably stupid people, managed it all the time.

All, apparently, except him. Because he hadn’t known she existed, because he hadn’t lived with her, grown with her.

“Aleet! Aleet!” Allie yelled with enough lung power to drown a five-alarm pealing bell.

“Hey, hey, hey!” he countered. “I can hear you fine, sweetheart. I just don’t understand.”

He tried his best grin, the one that invariably made old ladies offer him their seat on the subway, the one that had made him the object of several stray dogs’ undying loyalty. It had zero effect on his daughter.

“Aleet!”

“Give me a clue,” he said, feeling desperate.

She pounded the bed with baby fists and tears sprang to her enormous blue eyes, filling them, smiting him.

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