Search & Rescue: His Best Friend's Baby\The Sharpshooter's Secret Son by Mallory Kane

Author:Mallory Kane
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781460383841
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SHARPSHOOTER’S

SECRET SON

For Debbie and Lorraine

CHAPTER ONE

THEY CALLED THEM ghost towns for a reason.

Black Hills Search and Rescue Specialist Deke Cunningham wasn’t afraid of anything. Not anymore. But the late afternoon shadows spooked him. They moved with him, reaching out like gnarled fingers across the empty, dusty main street of Cleancutt, Wyoming. He tried to shake off the feeling, but it wouldn’t shake. Probably because today he wasn’t working a routine assignment to rescue a deserving but nameless innocent.

Today he was searching for his ex-wife.

He glanced at the GPS locator built into his phone, then at the two-story building with the letters H E L barely readable above the door. The O and the T had long since faded.

This was it. The location where BHSAR computer expert Aaron Gold had finally managed to triangulate Mindy’s last cell phone transmission.

Mindy. She didn’t deserve this. She hadn’t deserved anything she’d gotten for loving him.

And he’d never deserved her.

Deke approached the two-story building, doing his damnedest not to swipe his palm across the nape of his neck, where prickles of awareness tingled. He was being watched.

No surprise there.

He even knew who was watching him. The same person who’d kidnapped his ex-wife. Well—who’d ordered her kidnapped, anyhow.

Novus Ordo. The infamous international terrorist who’d already targeted another member of the BHSAR team, Matt Parker.

We’ve got your wife, the obviously disguised voice on the cell phone had said.

Alarm bells had clanged in his head and his gut had clenched with worry. Still, he’d had to smile a little. Whoever the kidnapper was, he had no idea what he’d gotten hold of when he’d grabbed Mindy Cunningham.

“Ex-wife,” he’d muttered, working to sound bored and uninterested. “And be my guest. You can have her.”

“This is no joke, Cunningham. We’ve got her and we’ll kill her if you don’t do what we say.”

“The only thing I think you’ve got is her cell phone and a death wish.”

The kidnapper had taken the bait. He’d put Mindy on the phone.

Deke Cunningham, don’t pay them one red cent! It’s a trap—

Tough words. Exactly what he’d expected from her. But beneath her brave words he heard fear—a soul-deep terror he’d never heard in her voice before. And that, more than anything the kidnapper said, scared him to death.

Something was wrong with her. Something beyond being kidnapped. While that alone would be enough to terrify any woman, his Mindy was made of stronger stuff.

In the twenty years since he’d first spotted her hanging by her heels from the top rung of the elementary school jungle gym, he’d never seen anything she couldn’t handle.

Except him.

Her tight, strained voice, cut by static, still echoed in his head as he paused at the bottom of the dilapidated wooden steps of the only hotel in Cleancutt, Wyoming.

He’d heard about the ghost towns of Wyoming all his life. Eighty years ago, Cleancutt and other coal-mining camps had been booming towns. But by the 1950s, underground coal mining had given way to strip-mining, so today Cleancutt was a ghost, a dying piece of history located near the city of Casper.

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