I clenched my fists against the table, forcing myself to remain still even after hearing ‘the man who took her.’ The man who took my woman and my unborn fucking child. The man who was not long for this world.
“Got his plate number then hacked into the computer system of his vehicle and tracked him to a place in the mountains owned by a man named Conrad Ashton,” Wire added.
“Fuck,” I hissed.
Everyone recognized the last name.
“The father?” Hansen guessed.
“Yeah, the father of that rich scumbag we took care of months ago. One who isn’t as stupid as we thought,” Wire grumbled.
“The father who is fucking about to be dead,” I seethed.
Swiss banged his knife on the table in agreement.
“We know anyone with a plane?” Hansen asked the table. The location was about a six-hour drive, and a lot could happen in six hours.
My skin crawled.
A lot could happen in six fucking minutes.
“Rosie will know someone,” Wire offered.
Hansen nodded once, not even questioning him. No one questioned Rosie’s ability to get a private plane on the closest airstrip within an hour.
“We just need a pilot,” Hansen added.
“I can do it.”
Everyone at the table looked at Swiss.
He shrugged. “Had some time on my hands, figured learning how to fly would come in handy. And it has.”
After a beat of silence, Hansen nodded. “Yeah, it’s come in handy. But you better fuckin’ know what you’re doin’. I don’t plan on dying in a plane crash.”
Swiss looked offended. “I don’t plan on dying in a plane crash either. I’ve got a pussy appointment in two days that I’ve been looking forward to for months.” His eyes flickered to mine, instantly sobering. “And no fuckin’ way would I do that to Freya.”
That was the closest anyone had come to an accusation. To laying the blame for this shit at my feet. And he knew I couldn’t do shit about it because he was the pilot. He was the only way I’d get to Freya before some shit happened that we could never come back from.
If it hadn’t already happened.
FREYA
The man wasn’t rough with me when he got me out of the car. Just a hand on my upper arm, firm but not painful. He kept glancing to the swell of my stomach. He was obviously uncomfortable with it.
“You don’t have to do this,” I told him as he walked us through the high-ceilinged rooms of the mansion. It smelled like expensive candles and cleaning products. There was a fire roaring in a great room, and it certainly looked impressive, but the entire house was freezing cold.
The man walking me hadn’t responded. He also had not taken me back to the car then drove me back to the grocery store parking lot, so I’d figured he didn’t feel overly bad about kidnapping a pregnant woman.
I’d been wracking my brain as to who would be kidnapping me in the middle of the week, in the middle of my quiet, peaceful little town. The town I’d only been in for just over a month. I hadn’t run into any kind of trouble there. Which meant it was trouble linked to what I’d left behind. Or at least thought I’d left behind.
The first and most obvious choice was trouble in the form of a man. In the form of a man wearing a cut who still owned my wretched, broken heart.
It hurt to even think about him, even here, in my captor’s home. Or lair. Although I could be wrong, I got the feeling that these were not the kind of people the Sons of Templar did business with. Which left me stumped as to who, or what, I could be connected to.
Until I walked into the study.
“Mr. Ashton,” I gasped, stopping in place.
Derek’s father looked just like him. He was handsome with only a peppering of gray in his hair and subtle creases to his face that did not betray his age. Men did tend to age better than women because the universe was cruel, but I’d always suspected he got Botox. It wasn’t obvious, especially when he was standing next to his wife who was a poster girl for plastic surgery.
He hadn’t looked at me, his focus on the man no longer holding my arm. “That’ll be all, Sanderson” he dismissed him. Like the man had brought him his dry cleaning instead of the pregnant ex-girlfriend of his now dead son.
I wondered if he knew his son was dead. Maybe, since he’d had me dragged here.
He had been standing behind his fancy, rich guy, oak desk that was meticulously clean and organized, just like the rest of this house. Like the other one in Texas that I’d visited for a dinner party. The kind where you were afraid to breathe for fear of spilling or messing something up. There was no ‘welcome to our home’, it was more, ‘we’re rich, and if you break anything, we’ll sue you until you’re bankrupt.’