The Baby's Guardian

After nine hours, Shaw was familiar with that voice, though the guy had refused to identify himself. But it was a voice Shaw would remember, and when he had everyone safely out of this, he was going after this SOB and his accomplice. That wasn’t his normal role as a captain. These days, he was pretty much a supervisor working from his desk, but for this, he’d make an exception and do some field duty.

“Is anyone hurt?” Harris asked the gunman.

“No. It was a misunderstanding, that’s all. It won’t happen again. Will it? “

“No,” someone said. A woman. And her voice created an uneasy feeling inside Shaw.

No way.

It couldn’t be her.

Shaw jerked his phone from his pocket and scrolled through the numbers until he found Sabrina Carr’s. He jabbed the call button. Waited. And cursed when he heard the ringing. Not just on his own phone, but the sound was also coming through Harris’s cell. Each ring went unanswered, and each ring confirmed that this nightmare had just gotten a lot worse. Sabrina’s phone was on the fourth floor of that hospital.

And so was she.

“That was Sabrina Carr’s voice,” Shaw managed to say to Harris in a whisper.

Harris’s head whipped up, and he pinned his alarmed gaze to Shaw’s. “You mean …” Harris mouthed, but he didn’t finish.

Shaw didn’t finish it for him, either, but they both knew what this meant. Sabrina Carr was the surrogate carrying Shaw’s child. She was eight months pregnant.

And Sabrina was a hostage.

Shaw resisted the urge to lean against the patrol car that was just inches away, and he choked back the profanity. This was a complication he didn’t need, and the situation had just gotten a lot more personal.

“Are you certain the hostage is all right?” Harris demanded from the gunman.

“See for yourself,” the man answered.

Shaw looked up at the row of eight-foot-tall windows that encircled the entire fourth floor. The building was about thirty yards away, but he still saw the movement behind the thick glass.

Someone pushed a woman into view.

The height and build were right for it to be Sabrina. About five-six and average. So was the pregnant belly that her tan cargo shorts and bulky green top couldn’t hide. Ditto for that mop of shoulder-length red hair—Sabrina had hair like that. But praying he was wrong, Shaw grabbed a pair of binoculars from the officer next to him and took a closer look.

Hell.

It was Sabrina all right.

She was shades past being pale, and he could tell from her expression that she was terrified. Probably because she’d just come close to dying. That shot had no doubt been fired at her.

Even though there was no love lost between Sabrina and him, Shaw wasn’t immune to the terror he saw on her face and in her eyes. After all, she was carrying his child.

Their child, he silently amended.

The image of his late wife flashed through his head. The baby Sabrina was carrying should have been his wife’s. His and Fay’s. Sabrina should have been just a surrogate, that’s all, but that had changed when none of Fay’s eggs had been viable. Sabrina had become the egg donor then, too. Sabrina’s DNA, not Fay’s. More than a mere surrogate. But that was an old wound that he didn’t have time to nurse right now.

“Did you know Sabrina was in there?” Harris asked, placing his hand over the receiver so the gunman wouldn’t be able to hear the question.

Shaw shook his head. Sabrina had her regular prenatal checkups at a clinic in the hospital, but she wasn’t scheduled for anything this week. Shaw knew that because she always sent him the dates and times of her appointments. Not that he’d ever gone with her to any of them. But he knew she wasn’t scheduled for anything until the day after tomorrow.

So, why was she there?

“Ask to speak to her,” Shaw instructed.

Harris nodded. “I want to talk to the hostage to make sure she’s okay,” he relayed to the gunman.

The gunman didn’t respond right away, and with the binoculars pressed to his eyes, Shaw watched. Waited.

The seconds crawled by.

Then, much to his surprise, he saw the gloved hand jut out and give Sabrina the cell phone.

Because Shaw was watching her so closely, he saw her look in the direction of that hand. The gunman’s hand. Shaw could hear the man give her whispered instructions, but he couldn’t make out what the guy was saying. It was almost certainly some kind of threat.

“Captain Shaw Tolbert?” she said.

That sent another hush around him. Inside, Shaw was having a much stronger reaction than a hush. Why the devil was she asking for him? If the gunmen knew her association with the captain of the SAPD, things could get even worse for her.

And the baby.

“Yes?” Shaw answered, trying to sound official and detached. Judging from the sound of her voice, the call was on speaker at Sabrina’s end, which meant the gunmen were listening to his every word. He certainly didn’t want to let them know that he knew her name, just in case he could salvage this situation.

“They read my medical records,” Sabrina explained. She swallowed hard. “They know you’re my emergency contact.”

Shaw choked back a groan. By knowing that bit of information, the gunmen had already guessed that Sabrina and he had some kind of relationship. Heck, her records might even say that he was the baby’s father. If so, the gunmen had some serious leverage.

Both Sabrina and the baby.

“Are you … all right?” Shaw asked.

“She is, for now,” the gunman answered for her. “You’ll need to do some things to make it stay that way.”

Even though he could clearly hear the man, Shaw took Harris’s phone and brought it closer to his mouth.

“What things?”

The gunman grabbed Sabrina’s phone as well, but she stayed in the window, staring down at the crowd. He saw her pick through the faces until she spotted him. Shaw looked away. He needed to focus, and he couldn’t do that if he was looking at her. Because looking at Sabrina only brought on those haunting images of his wife.

A man didn’t forget watching his wife die in his arms.

“My partner and I are ready to get out of here,” the gunman announced.

Shaw didn’t celebrate either silently or aloud because he knew this was just the first step to ending this, and every step afterward would be even more dangerous than the present situation.

“We’re coming out through the front entrance,” the gunman continued. “And we’ll have a hostage with us.”

They were probably planning to take Sabrina, unless Shaw could get them to change their minds.