Kitabı oku: «The Coltons of Eden Falls»
You’re just playing a part.
Despite everything, Tate could feel his body responding to Hannah. Responding to the intoxicating, sweet taste of her skin against his lips.
Dammit, get a grip, Colton.
Satisfied that he had performed as expected for whatever camera or cameras hidden in the room, Tate whispered the same message into Hannah’s ear that he’d told her yesterday.
“I’m here to rescue you,” he told her.
He couldn’t allow his guard to go down, not even for a moment. “You and the others,” he added. “But this isn’t going to be easy and I’m going to need your help to pull it off.”
Hannah turned her head slowly to look at him. He could tell by the look in her eyes that he’d made a breakthrough.
She was finally beginning to believe him.
Colton
Showdown
Marie Ferrarella
MILLS & BOON
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About the Author
MARIE FERRARELLA, a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author, has written more than two hundred books for Mills & Boon, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com.
To
Sebastian Burgess,
Welcome to the world,
little guy
Prologue
Her face haunted him.
Ever since he’d seen her on that DVD, the one that had been made to showcase the “selection” available for purchase by the members of the “discerning” male audience viewing it, Detective Tate Colton had been equally fascinated and sick to his stomach.
Fascinated because Hannah Troyer, one of several young women displayed on the video, was at once hypnotically beautiful and so obviously innocent. And sick to his stomach because he knew what was going to happen to Hannah. Knew what was going to happen to all the innocent young women who appeared on the video. Each and every one of them was destined to become the object of some depraved pervert’s lechery—as long as the right price was quoted and met.
Unless he and the FBI agents on his team got to those girls first.
Someone was kidnapping Amish girls and selling them to the highest bidder because in this jaded age of too much too soon, the idea of an untouched, pure young woman still held an almost addictive allure for some men.
In this case, the “some” were exceptionally wealthy men because innocence had become a commodity that did not come cheap. Instead, it was bade and bargained for like the rare product it had become, only to be forever lost at the hands of depraved men who had no idea how to rightly value such a treasure.
Eyes on the screen, Tate went back over the DVD and played it forward again, watching the same small section he’d viewed before of the girl he’d seen while going undercover as a prospective buyer.
Watching her.
Gray-blue eyes, alabaster skin, hair like flame.
They called her Jade. But she was Hannah Troyer.
He knew her name—her real name, only because Hannah’s brother, Caleb, was desperately searching for his younger sister. The search had created strange bedfellows because, just recently, Caleb had wound up becoming engaged to his sister, Emma, a Special Agent with the FBI. They were working together on a joint task force to find the missing girls. According to what his sister had said, she and Caleb were going to be married once this case was finally wrapped up.
That made it sound so easy, Tate thought cynically. A piece of cake—and it wasn’t.
There wasn’t anything at all easy about this case. Not for the two dead girls they’d already found. Not for the whole of the small Pennsylvania Amish community—ironically called Paradise Ridge—which was holding its collective breath, waiting and praying for their own to be returned to them unharmed.
Tate had an uneasy feeling that wasn’t possible. Even if they found all the other missing girls and they were still alive, they were no longer unharmed. Far greater than the physical scars they might have incurred were the emotional scars that had to run across their young, tender souls.
In this sex trafficking ring, the mostly faceless bastards who were abducting the young women were systematically destroying their innocence so that the girls—all between the ages of 16 and 20—bore little to no resemblance to the sweet young women their families were frantically searching for.
“I’d like to gut each and every one of those bastards,” he muttered under his breath, finally shutting off the DVD player. The large screen he’d been watching went blank.
Emma, the only other person in the room with him, laughed shortly. There was no mirth in the sound. “You’re not the only one who feels that way.”
As she spoke, she put her hand on Tate’s broad shoulder and was surprised by how rigid it felt. Well, maybe not so surprised, she silently amended. Tate, who’d been the one to initially ask her to join his task force, took his work very seriously, but this had to be a new level of intensity, even for him.
“I think that if we ever find the people who kidnapped Hannah, Caleb would be tempted to temporarily renounce his pacifistic ways, just for the time it would take to pummel these worthless scum into the ground. But indulging in fantasies isn’t going to help us rescue these girls,” Emma pointed out. “And we are going to rescue them,” she told Tate with utter conviction, not for the first time.
Failure, as the saying went, was not an option here. There were too many lives at stake, too many families waiting to get their daughters back.
Tate knew he would have felt a personal obligation to bring the girls all back to their families even if the people affected by this heinous ring were not technically his neighbors.
The Colton family ranch in Eden Falls, Pennsylvania, was named the Double C in honor of Charlotte Colton. Charlotte was the woman who, even though she hadn’t given them biological life, had, for all intents and purposes, along with her husband, Donovan, given him and his five siblings a reason to exist, a reason to live.
The couple, whose lives were so tragically cut short along with those of so many others on 9/11, were well-known for their dedication and their generosity. Over the course of two decades, they had adopted six completely unrelated orphans, given them their name and their love and knitted them into a family. A family who never took what they had for granted. The ranch where they grew up was right outside a little village named Paradise Ridge.
Civilization, with all its technological progress, seemed to have stopped at the borders of the tiny town. The hardworking citizens of that town led what was considered an idyllic life that echoed their ancestors’ existence. Until a serpent somehow found its way into Paradise Ridge and stole some of the town’s young women.
Tate was determined to find those girls and the ones from Ohio.
Especially, he silently promised the face that haunted him, Hannah. Find them and free them. Even if it was the last thing he ever did on this earth.
“C’mon, Big Brother,” Emma was urging him. “You and I have a sting to plan and coordinate.”
Snapping out of his mental fog, Tate rose from the chair he’d taken to view the DVD for the umpteenth time, searching for some telltale clue he might have missed before.
He looked at his sister as they got ready to meet the others involved in this undercover operation. “Tell the truth, Tomato-head, you’re going to miss this once you turn in your badge for a butter churn.” He still loved to use her childhood nickname, to her annoyance.
Try as he might, he just couldn’t picture his driven sister in that kind of laid-back, rural setting—not for more than ten minutes.
“No, I’m not,” Emma countered with feeling. Then, when Tate’s eyes held hers, she shrugged. “Well, maybe just a little,” she allowed as they left the office. Because he’d forced the truth out of her, Emma punched his arm.
Tate’s deep laugh echoed up and down the hallway. Maybe Emma wasn’t going to miss this life, but he sure as hell was going to miss Emma.
Chapter 1
He wasn’t one of those people who had an obsession about cleanliness. Tate Colton had never had a problem with getting his hands—or any other part of him, for that matter—dirty, if the job required it. That kind of dirt he could put up with and ignore.
But dealing with these subhuman creatures who made their living trafficking in human flesh, in destroying young lives and thinking absolutely nothing of it, was an entirely different matter. It made him want to go back to the hotel room where he was registered under his assumed name and take a shower. A long, scalding-hot shower to wash away their stink.
Once he received the assignment from his supervisor, Hugo Villanueva, he knew that going undercover in order to find and save the Amish young women who had been kidnapped would require him to associate with, in his opinion, the absolute dregs of the earth.
Dregs in expensive suits.
You could dress a monkey up in fine clothes, but he was still a monkey, Tate thought. No amount of expensive clothing could change that, or change the fact that the people he was forced to interact with were lower than scum.
He’d think more about stepping on a beetle than he would about terminating the existence of one of these cockroaches.
To look at the man who had brought him up to this particular hotel suite—his current tour guide to this underworld—someone might have thought the man was a successful businessman or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company instead of the utterly soulless lowlife that he actually was.
Impeccably dressed in what was easily a thousand-dollar suit, his guide to this lurid world of virgins-for-sale smirked at him confidently as he opened the door leading into the suite’s bedroom.
“I’m sure we can find something to pique your appetite, Mr. Conrad,” he said.
Tate scowled at the shorter man. “I said no names,” he snapped, mindful of the part he was playing in this surreal drama.
The other man laughed, enjoying what he considered to be the display of ignorance on the part of this new client.
“Nothing to be worried about. What are they going to do?” he asked, gesturing at the bedroom and the young women being held there. Each and every one of them were dressed in identical long, slinky white gowns. “Post it on the internet? None of them even know what the hell the internet is,” he stressed, jeering at the young women who were virtually prisoners in this suite. “They all live in the Stone Age. Trust me.” He patted Tate’s arm and the latter shrugged him off as if he was flinging off an annoying bug—an act that wasn’t lost on the man. “Your name—and your sterling reputation—are both safe here,” he assured Tate.
“C’mon, c’mon,” the man snapped at the young woman he was herding into the room for his “client’s” final review. “He hasn’t got all night. Or have you?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at Tate, a lecherous grin spread across his angular face. “You know, if you’ve changed your mind and want to make your purchase now—” He left the sentence open, looking at Tate expectantly.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” Tate answered formally. The deal was that he got to see the young women in person in order for him to finalize his choice, and then the negotiations regarding the pending “purchase” would go from there.
Inside, Tate was struggling to contain his fury. The woman he’d “requested,” “Jade,” was looking at him apprehensively like a mistreated animal afraid of being beaten.
Had she been beaten?
Tate looked her over quickly. “What’s wrong with her?” he demanded, channeling his anger into the part he was playing—a man who wanted the “goods” he was considering purchasing to be perfect. He was well aware of the fact that the blue-gray eyes continued to watch his every move. Tate swung around to confront the other man. “She looks like she’s been manhandled,” he accused angrily.
The man shrugged indifferently. “Don’t worry. Nothing happened that would have left a visible mark on her.” His flat, brown eyes raked over Hannah from head to toe, as if to reassure himself that she wasn’t displaying any sign of bruising in plain sight. “That’s the one rule—other than payment up front—the boss won’t tolerate any visible marks left on the merchandise.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Tate saw Hannah flinch at the label the man had contemptuously slapped on her. Merchandise.
His anger flared.
“She’s a person, not merchandise,” Tate retorted, glaring at the guard.
“Hey, at the price you’re going to pay, she’s anything you want her to be. You want a person? You got it, she’s a person.” He turned to look at the redhead he’d led out of the bedroom for Ted Conrad’s perusal. “A soft, sweet-smelling person, aren’t you, honey?”
Smirking, he slid his hand along her cheek and down the side of her neck.
It was obvious that the guard didn’t intend on stopping there.
“I’ll thank you to take your hands off her,” Tate warned darkly as the man’s hand just grazed the swell of her breasts.
Anger flashed in the other man’s eyes, but just as quickly, it subsided. The main reason he’d been told to bring this client here was to get Conrad to make his final decision so that the deal could proceed.
Apparently, it looked as if the deal was about to be sealed. The bottom line was, and had always been, money. So, much as he would have personally rather shot out this client’s kneecaps, the guard raised his hands in the air in mock surrender.
“They’re off,” he declared dramatically, wiggling his fingers in the air to underscore his point. The smirk on his face deepened as he looked at Hannah knowingly. “So, this is the one you want, eh?”
“She’s the one,” Tate replied, his tone scrubbed free of any emotion.
The other man nodded his approval. “Gotta say, you’ve got good taste. She’s a beauty.” With hooded eyes, he looked her over again. It was obvious that he was putting himself in the client’s place. “She also looks like she might last you awhile.”
Hannah drew in a breath. They’d given them all some sort of pills, but she had managed to fool her captors into thinking she’d swallowed hers when she hadn’t. Each word from the guard felt like a dagger, stabbing into her heart.
Her eyes swept over both men. “Please don’t do this,” Hannah pleaded.
It was impossible to know which of them she addressed her plea to.
For his part, though he took care not to show it, Tate felt terrible. He could certainly imagine what was going through Hannah’s mind. What Caleb’s sister was anticipating. He would have given anything to comfort her, but that wasn’t what was going to save her.
In order to accomplish that, he had to be convincing in his role. Which meant that he needed to go on with this charade, continue to maintain this facade so that he could, ultimately, get her and her friends away from these men.
If he went about it the traditional way, pulling out a service weapon and threatening to shoot the other man if he got in his way, Tate knew that he might—or might not—be able to get out of the hotel with Hannah. Most likely, they’d be stopped before they ever made it to the street level.
No, this way was more effective. It just required a great deal of focus and an iron will—and the ability to block out that look in her eyes to keep it from getting to him.
“What did I tell you about opening your mouth?” the guard was demanding angrily. He pulled back his hand, ready to bring it down on her face.
Hannah’s alarmed cry tore at his heart.
“If she has one mark on her, the deal’s off,” Tate warned him in a voice that was deadly calm, belying the turmoil that lay just beneath.
The guard stopped in midswing. The expression on his face told Tate that the guard was getting fed up with what he undoubtedly considered a high-and-mighty client. The man let his guard down for a second, the sneer on his face telling Tate that he thought he knew his type. Not just knew it, but hated it because he felt inferior to the supposedly rich client.
“You don’t buy her, someone else will,” the guard jeered contemptuously. But he dropped his hand to his side nonetheless. “Sit!” he ordered Hannah with less compassion than he would have directed to a pet dog. Only when she complied did the guard finally look his way. “So, I take it we’ve got a deal. You’re interested in acquiring this tasty morsel?”
Tate’s expression gave nothing away, including the fact that he could easily vivisect him without so much as a thought. “I might be,” he replied after a beat had gone by.
“Might be,” the man echoed with contempt. He was at the end of his patience. “Look, the man I represent doesn’t like having his time wasted. We’re alike that way because neither do I.”
Tate slowly walked around the young woman, deliberately pausing and taking a lock of her hair between his fingers. He made a show of sniffing it. “That goes both ways.”
Suspicion immediately entered the guard’s eyes. “So what do you have in mind?”
There was no hesitation on Tate’s part. “A man doesn’t buy an expensive car without taking it on a test run, seeing how it handles,” he pointed out, his voice continuing to be flat.
It killed him to see that Hannah had winced again in response to his words, and he saw real fear in her eyes as she watched him.
How did he get it across to her that he was one of the good guys without blowing his cover?
“Go on, I’m listening,” the other man said.
“I’d like a private session with her, to see how we ‘get along,’” Tate proposed.
“The boss doesn’t deal in damaged goods,” the other man snapped.
“I have no intentions of ‘damaging’ her. Just ‘sampling’ her,” Tate informed him. “There are a lot of ways a man can see if he likes the goods he’s getting.”
He was standing in front of Hannah now, looking into her eyes, wishing there was some way to set her mind at ease. His back was to the other man and he smiled at Hannah. The smile was kind, devoid of the lust that had supposedly brought him here. Lowering his head so that his lips were right next to the young woman’s ear, he whispered, “Caleb sent me,” before straightening and backing off.
Her eyes widened, but she held her tongue.
Tate said a quick, silent prayer of thanksgiving to whoever it was that watched over law enforcement officers.
“What did you say to her?” the guard demanded. There was no arguing with his tone.
Tate turned to look at him, emulating the latter’s previous smug look. “I told her that paradise was at hand.”
As he said that, Tate slanted a look toward Hannah, hoping she would put two and two together and take some comfort in the covert message. He couldn’t tell by her expression if she’d believed him—or even understood what he was trying to tell her. He wasn’t even sure if she’d heard him say that Caleb had sent him.
Terror, he knew, had a way of blocking out everything else.
The man relaxed a little, then laughed. “Good one,” he pronounced. “That’s where she and some of those other girls come from, some backward hole-in-the-wall called Paradise Ridge.”
Tate tried to sound casually uninterested. A man making small talk, involved in a meaningless conversation that would be forgotten before he walked out the door. “Is that where all the girls are from? This Paradise Ridge place you just mentioned?”
His question was met with a nod. “This batch is. They picked up others from—” He abruptly stopped his narrative. His eyebrows narrowed over small, deep-set eyes. “What’s with all the questions?”
Tate shrugged. “Just trying to find out how big a selection you’ve got—in case things don’t work out with this one,” he explained.
“Oh, it’ll work out,” the man promised. There was no room for argument. He looked at Hannah pointedly. “She knows what’ll happen to her if it doesn’t. Don’t you, honey?” The smile on his lips was cold enough to freeze a bucket of water in the middle of May.
This time, instead of fear rising in Hannah’s eyes, Tate thought he saw anger. Anger and frustration because, he guessed, there was nothing she could do right now about the anger she was feeling.
The other man was apparently oblivious to her reaction. It was clear that fear was all he looked for, all he valued.
“Don’t want to wind up like your girlfriends now, do you?” he taunted her.
Things suddenly fell into place. The annoying little troll was referring to the two dead girls Emma and Hannah’s brother had initially discovered. Solomon Miller, a so-called “repentant” Amish outcast had brought them straight to the bodies, hoping to use the fact that he was informing on his “boss” as a bargaining chip.
Initially part of the group of men involved in the sex trafficking ring, Miller had become the task force’s inside man, trading information for the promise of immunity once all the pieces of this case came together and they got enough on the men running this thing to take them to court—and put them away for the next century or so.
If they didn’t wait until they discovered exactly who was behind all this and bring him—or her—in, if they just grabbed up the two-bit players they were dealing with in this little drama, the operation would just fold up and relocate someplace else.
And Amish girls would continue disappearing as long as there were sick men to make their abductions a profitable business.
No, they had to catch the mastermind in order for this operation to be deemed a success.
“Don’t threaten her,” Tate warned. When the guard shot him a malevolent look, he told him, “I want her to be willing to be with me, not because she was threatened with harm if she wasn’t.”
The guard looked at him as if he wasn’t dealing with a full deck. “Hey, man, don’t you know? It’s better when they fight you.”
The world would be a much better place if he could just squash this cockroach, Tate thought, struggling to hang on to his temper. With no qualms whatsoever, Tate would have been more than willing to put everyone out of their collective misery—himself included.
But instead, he was forced to tamp down his temper and nonchalantly tell him that “We each have our preferences.”
“Yeah, well, you’re the man with the bankroll,” the guard grumbled resentfully.
“Yes, I am.”
Tate was grateful for the elaborate lengths the department had gone to in order to give him a plausible backstory. His brother, Gunnar, had funded his huge bank account.
Whoever was running this sex trafficking operation wasn’t a fool, Tate concluded. He was very, very careful to get everything right. That included vetting his clients rather than just accepting them at face value, or going with hearsay.
Nothing was simple anymore, Tate thought. Not even the peddling of flesh.
“So it’s settled?” Tate asked the man. The blank look he received in return forced him to elaborate. “I can have a private session with her?”
“Soon as I run it by the boss” came the reply.
“And how long is that going to take?”
He knew things had to progress at their own pace, but he hated the idea of leaving the girl alone with this thug for another moment, much less for another day or two. There was no telling what could happen in that amount of time, and he didn’t want to take any more chances than he had to.
“Anxious?” the other man jeered, enjoying himself. He liked having the upper hand and, in this case, he clearly got to call the shots. “Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. She’ll be ready for you then.”
Just what did that scum mean by “ready”?
A premonition had a shiver zipping down Tate’s back, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about the circumstances. Tate was well aware that if he pressed, if he remotely said that she looked ready now or tried in any way to hurry this along, the whole thing could just fall apart on him. There were steps to take and he knew it.
That didn’t make taking them any easier.
If this was rushed, the people they were after would smell a setup and not just back off but vanish into thin air, taking the young women with them. He’d seen it before.
Hell, he’d been part of it before—having an operation unravel on him that allowed a killer to be set free. The man was ultimately taken down and brought to justice, but not before he’d killed several more young women. Young women who wouldn’t have died if he had done his job right in the first place, Tate thought ruefully.
That wasn’t going to happen again, he vowed. This time, he was going to do things by the book. Even if that meant he had to find a way to physically restrain himself.
“What time tomorrow?” he asked the guard.
“We’ll get back to you about that,” the man told him, affecting a superior attitude.
Tate narrowed his eyes, looking as cold as the man he was dealing with. Colder. “I don’t like being jerked around,” he said in a voice that contained an unspoken warning.
“Nobody’s jerking you around,” the other man promised, sounding more than a little nervous that this encounter could turn physical. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said again, this time far more amiably.
“I’ll look forward to it,” Tate said, not bothering to tone down the note of sarcasm in his voice. He looked from Hannah to the man, wondering if she even realized how breathtakingly beautiful she was. She reminded him of a rose newly in bloom. “In the meantime, I don’t want anyone touching her.”
The other man began to smirk again. “She really got to you, eh?”
Tate was aware that men like the one he was dealing with directly understood only one thing: money. It was the only language they spoke. However, he hadn’t been given the suitcase that was to be filled with the cash he was to trade for Hannah. That came tomorrow.
Whatever cash he had on him at the moment was his own, but it was only paper as far as Tate was concerned. Paper that was capable of buying both him and Hannah a little peace of mind.
Taking out his wallet, Tate removed a hundred-dollar bill. As the other man eagerly put his hand out, Tate tore the bill in half and handed one piece to him.
“What the hell is this?” the man demanded. “Some kind of stupid game?”
“No game,” Tate assured him. “You get the other half of the hundred when I come back tomorrow and see for myself that she’s all right.” His eyes bored into the other man’s dark ones. “We have a deal?”
The other man cursed roundly, then shoved his half of the bill into his pocket. “We have a deal,” he retorted grudgingly.
“Good.” Tate turned on his heel and crossed to the door.
Tate could almost feel Hannah’s eyes watching him as he walked out of the suite.
Tomorrow seemed like an eternity away.
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