Not Without Her Child by Tara Taylor Quinn

Author:Tara Taylor Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2023-04-26T12:29:07+00:00

Chapter 16

If someone in Lincoln was involved in Brooke’s disappearance—even, say, with the disposal of the body—they’d likely be familiar with Jessica’s name.

From Clint, maybe. Definitely from the stories that had been all over the news eighteen months before. And again during Clint’s trial.

She’d spread her name all over the damned village.

From there, finding her address was a no-brainer for anyone with enough smarts to do a simple people search.

Could be that Clint hadn’t meant to hurt his daughter. Maybe he really had just been meaning to scare Jessica, to wake her up to his way of thinking, to make her squirm so she’d see that she was wrong to have taken his boat away from him.

After a week and two days of studying the guy, observing him in action, Brian could see all of that. And maybe he’d hurt Brooke without meaning to do so.

If, say, the gun went off accidentally. Maybe he’d had it to protect himself in case someone came after him for the kidnapping. Had had it out and ready and the baby had scooted to it without him noticing.

She’d had the strength to throw a toy with enough force to leave a mark on a grown man.

Maybe Clint Johnson had dropped the child. Or left her alone on a bed without rails and she’d rolled off, hit her head.

And another strong possibility—he’d sold her.

Not a single one of the scenarios left a happy ending in the future, where Clint and Jessica magically repaired their relationship, found each other again, he got out of prison, and they got Brooke back.

Lying fully dressed on the three-inch mattress that did little to cushion his weight, Brian stared at the ceiling. His client had excused herself to bed as soon as she’d dropped his bedding on the pulled-out bed visible from the dining table.

The fact that no one but Brian knew that she’d vacated her master suite on the far end of the house, in favor of the small guest room next to her office, gave him some comfort.

Clint—if the warning came from him and he had the wherewithal to make someone do his dirty work while he was in prison—would expect her to be at the master suite end of the house.

If someone got by the cops out front and managed to get in the house, they’d have to pass Brian before they got to Jessica.

Of course, it was possible that whoever she might have tipped off in Lincoln had found a way to get a message to Clint in jail. Possible that both scenarios were true—Clint was behind the message and Jessica had tipped off traffickers or someone guilty of tampering with a corpse.

Adding to his mental list of to-dos at first light. He needed jail records to know who Clint had been communicating with.

And when. Something Jessica had asked Anderson for, but hadn’t received.

And he needed a list of all of the residences Jessica had visited in Lincoln.

After a call to Anderson, he’d make a quick

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